Zoom Link: bit.ly/3ESVPjF

As a female immigrant from the former USSR in Israel and currently an alien in the US. I’m asking questions on belonging, longing for home and borders through language on plants. How language and representation helps build an image on political issues, especially when it comes to weeds and wild plants and the way it reflects on the political discourse on immigration.

Jenny Rafalson (Born in the former USSR and grew up in Israel) is a photographer and a video artist, based between NYC, Chicago and Tel-Aviv. Rafalson question the meaning of belonging in modern society, detachment and yearning for home, post-colonization in different contemporary cultures, often through the use of plants. She exhibited at Yi gallery, Brooklyn (2023), NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (2022), Expo Chicago (2022), Filter photo (2021), 062 gallery ,Chicago (2020) and The sixth Israel Photography Festival, Tel- Aviv, 2018. Rafalson holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, (2020), BFA Hadassah College Bachelor program (2013).

Tanda is back with a new group of generous knowledge carriers ready to talk through the assembled afterlife, water’s relationship to the body, urban semiotics, auto-constructed pathways in the global south, and post-colonial story telling!

Josué Esaú will co-facilitate this Spring ’23 season. Josué participated in the Spring ’22 season with the topic: Mesofuturism: Reclaiming Historical Identity through Archiving and Critical Fabulation.

This season was pre-filled with applicants from the fall open call pool. We are grateful for the interest and word of mouth support that has grown this program to have enough applicants for two seasons.

Sessions are virtual, free, and open to the public. Closed captioning available. Recordings of Tandas are not posted online.

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.

Co-Facilitator
Josué Esaú channels Mesoamerican cosmology, culture, and ritual to anchor reconnection with ancestry, land, and energy. Following the tradition of Afro- and Indigenous Futurisms, Esaú ventures the energetic middle spaces, spiritual-temporal portals and sites of future knowledge through the coined framework of Meso-Futurism. Aware of problematic pseudo-histories and distrust in science-fiction relationship to western ideas of progress and settler colonial time, Esaú creates garments, ritual devices, and collaborative performance as a mode of accountability, play, and care work to offer bridges to Maya space-time. He proposes ancient, plural ways to mark and enjoy time and space, entwining ourselves with the inherent rhythms of the earth, the cosmos and our co-inhabitants.

Tanda Spring 2023
Dates: Mondays, 03/27 – 05/01
Times: 6:30-8:30pm CT / 7:30-9:30 ET
Zoom Link: bit.ly/3ESVPjF