Spring 2025 | ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping
In this series, we highlighted the work of artists, scholars, and knowledge-keepers whose works attend to what Toni Morrison describes as the “pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” (Morrison 2019) The reparative labor of re-memory invited us to recognize the ways that we are intimately bound up with undocumented or under-documented histories and the urgent need for "reconstituting and recollecting a usable past.” Kenyan author and scholar Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, whose work seeks to redress the historical amnesia and “dismemberment” of the colonial enterprise, sees memory as “the site of dreams, and of desire, is thus crucial to the construction of our being.”
Feb 13, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award Talk: The Kitchen Project
The first event of ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping features OHMA Alum, Ariel Urim Chung, who will speak about her Brodsky-award winning thesis work and larger artistic practice. The Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award is given to a student whose thesis makes an important contribution to knowledge and most exemplifies the rigor, creativity, and ethical integrity that OHMA teaches its students. Urim Chung’s thesis work, “Eating Asian: Listening to Asiatic Femininity in the Kitchen” contemplates the embodied experiences of diasporic Asian mothers, daughters, and non-binary children and their relationship to food and maternal figures. Chung’s work models ways to utilize the possibilities of a relational practice with sound as a medium that reassesses the power balance of the interlocutors of oral history.
Feb 20, 2025 at 5:30 PM
When We All Get To Heaven
The second event in the series ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship, and Knowledge-Keeping will feature the creators of the forthcoming audio documentary, “When We All Get To Heaven.” Lynne Gerber, Ariana Nedelman, Siri Colom. “When We All Get to Heaven” is a documentary project that tells the story of one of the first gay-positive churches, the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, and how it faced the personal, social, and political trials of the AIDS epidemic, including the deaths of 500 of its members. The forthcoming project is based on an archive of 1200 cassette tapes recorded by the congregation during the height of the AIDS epidemic. This event will feature a short talk by Gerber, Nedelman, and Colom, followed by a Q&A with the audience. We will convene after the event from 7:30 pm to 8 pm to discuss with our guests as a class.
Mar 6, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Altars Archives
Drawing on my experience as a victim/survivor, activist for memory, artist, designer, and researcher, I will share the process of creating AMA y No Olvida, Memory Museum Against Impunity. This memory initiative was made in collaboration with the Association Mothers of April (AMA), a collective of families of victims of state violence organized in a context of authoritarian and brutal repression in Nicaragua. This endeavor was informed by the families' use of altars as technologies of remembrance and connection to the spiritual realm to share our individual pain with a broader community. Through this example, I will share strategies for decolonizing participatory art, design, and witnessing through embodied practices.
Apr 10, 2025 at 5:30
Contractions: Practicing Refusal
Weleski co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that served cuisine from countries with which the U.S. government is in conflict. Operating seven days a week for 7 years, Conflict Kitchen’s food was offered in custom-designed wrappers, upon which were printed interviews with those living in the nation-state of focus and the diasporas around the world. Highlighting past and current socially engaged projects that privilege first-person perspectives, Weleski will present several artworks that employ variations of speech shadowing, a translation and psycholinguistic method that they have utilized towards a fugitive, living archive of transgression, re-cognition, and re-memberment.