Tanda: Disruptive Pleasure: Love as an Artistic Practice, Anna Cai

In immigrant families, our parents and grandparents have taught us that the virtue of hard work will provide us with health and happiness. While this has been a viable survival tactic for our loved ones before us, how can we reorient ourselves away from the capitalist urges to submit to cycles of labor and instead focus our lives around pleasure and relationship building? In my experience of being raised by Asian immigrant communities, the facade of hard work becomes both a source and a cover for mental illness, abuse, and trauma.

I want to know how others in marginalized communities are experiencing or accessing this relationship with pleasure, how it surfaces, how we define pleasure, what methods our ancestors and elders have used in the past to approach pleasure in their lives, and how we can adapt them for our present and future uses. I want to know how artists (and especially queer and BIPOC artists) can be at the forefront of the movement to decolonize pleasure and champion disruptive love.

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Join us in a Tanda session to share conversations, resources, and knowledge.

Zoom registration link: https://tinyurl.com/2fbxzpe4

Tanda is a cohort program that aids individuals with their research and practice through self-directed and collective learning. It is a program providing time and space to gather, share, think and exchange conversations, resources, and knowledge on participants’ chosen topics and practices.

Sessions are virtual, free and open to the public.
Closed captioning available
For more information on the Tanda program, please visit chuquimarca.com/tanda

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Anna Cai (they/them) is an Asian American designer who tells stories that explore identity through costume design, performance art, film, graphic design, and print media. Shortly after they received their BS Architecture, they relocated to Lesotho where they served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2016-2018. They left the organization and fully embraced an art practice at the intersection of community building, education, and design. They are currently enrolled in the MFA Visual Communication program at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago where they are immersed in rituals of play around how history and culture are fabulated and reinvented.

Chuquimarca is an art library project tasked to gather and share resources related to Native, Caribbean, and Latin American art histories and contemporary art. Chuquimarca is based in Chicago.

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Tags: Anna Cai, Chicago, Chuquimarca, Lower West Side Disruptive Pleasure: Love as an Artistic Practice, Tanda