Tanda Spring 2021
Join us every Wednesday at 6pm-8pm CDT, starting March 31st ending May 5th, to share resources and conversations!
The Tanda program is an experimental cohort program that aids individuals with their research and practice through self-directed and collective learning by way of gathering and sharing resources, conversations, and knowledges.
Tanda Spring 2021 Cohort
Karen Dana Cohen
Tiffany M Johnson
Charles Ryan Long
Clau Rocha
Alex Santana
Lorena Cruz Santiago
Tanda Spring 2021 Topics & Schedule:
03/31 – Visual Sovereignty: Understanding the Ethics of Depicting Indigenous Culture in Visual Art, Lorena Cruz Santiago
04/07 – Marronage: Acts Between Freedom and Captivity, Tiffany M Johnson
04/14 – Making Visible the Invisible: Labor of Mothering as Immigrants in the Contemporary Culture and What Acquiring a New Language Provides, Karen Dana Cohen
04/21 – Bloodletting as Embodied Ritual: Latinx Tattoos, Clau Rocha
04/28 – Challenging Biometrics, AI, and Facial Recognition Technologies, Alex Santana
05/05 -The Love, Rage & Roses it will take to Welcome the Death of White Manhood, Charles Ryan Long
Zoom Information:
To receive Zoom link for all the sessions, please register here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctdumpqzooGdHMiP_f63R2AQVcPcJZENP4
Sessions are free to attend
Closed captions available
Sessions will be recorded for the sole purpose of the cohort and will not be posted online or shared with others.
Karen Dana Cohen was born in 1982 in Mexico City and lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received a BFA from The National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City (2005) and earned her MFA degree at Hunter College, New York (2011), where she based her art studio up until 2017.
Tiffany M Johnson is a queer Black woman from Chicago. She is a researcher, curator, and cultural worker with interests in public engagement through radical grassroots and cooperative practices. She attended SOAS, University of London, for her Master’s in Migration and Diasporas Studies and is currently pursuing a DIY (self-structured) Ph.D. focused on afro-indigenous land to human relations through artistic and hood-scholarship. Rooted in an ecological praxis, She explores alternative communal and political structures. In addition, Tiffany is studying sculpting under a local indigenous clay artist as a practice of ancestral remembrance.
Charles Ryan Long is a Chicago based multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and Black liberationist. He explores issues of representation, legacy, and loss through paper making, print, performance, installation and other mediums that lend themselves to the principles of the democratic multiple or communal experience. His work seeks out the audience and hopes to stir within them a push towards the future where we center the needs of those with the least amongst us.
Clau Rocha is a Chicago transplant from Washington state, with a BA in Mixed Media Art and a BA in Latinx Narratives. Currently they are working towards a Master’s in Visual and Critical Studies at SAIC where their hybrid research and studio practice revolves around applying ancestral ritual practices of mourning to a modern context.
Alex Santana is a writer and curator with a deep interest in conceptual, politically-engaged and participatory art. Originally from Newark, NJ, she is a child of immigrants from Spain and the Dominican Republic, and is committed to social equity, access, and liberation, most especially in the arts. Her writing has been published by Precog Magazine, The Latinx Project NYU, and the Brooklyn Rail. In 2018, she curated the exhibition Morir Soñando at Knockdown Center (Queens, NY), and since then has collaborated with artists and curators on other independent projects, including a DIY summer lecture series, Artists on Artists.
Lorena Cruz Santiago is a Mexican-American artist from Northern California currently based in Detroit, Michigan. She received her BFA in Photography from Sonoma State University in 2016 and her MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2019. Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes photography, video, and printmaking I make work that illustrates post-colonial themes like migration and assimilation.
What is a tanda? What is the Tanda program?
The Tanda program interweaves the formats of seminars, book clubs, research groups, and tandas. Tanda is a spanish term for an informal money lending circle that is formed amongst friends, families, and acquaintances. This short-term loan club is a cross-cultural concept that is also known as a susu, cundina, vaca, hui, paluwagan, and jamia, to name a few.
An example of a tanda is as follows: A tanda is formed between five people. Each person in the tanda puts $100 into a pot every week to total a $500 pot. The first member gets the $500 pot the first week. The second member gets the next $500 pot the second week, and the third member gets the next $500 pot the third week. This continues until each member in the tanda has received the $500 pot. Usually tandas are formed out of one member’s financial emergency or if a community project needs to be funded. Tandas become ways relationships strengthen, news and stories get exchanged, and community support and trust grows.
Following that concept, instead of waging money, participants in the Tanda program wage a subject. Each participant chooses to wage a topic that they are researching or reading to put in the program’s syllabus (pot). That syllabus will consist of weekly sessions and every session will be assigned a subject taken from the pot. Each member, except the member who waged the week’s topic, will research that week’s subject and regroup in every session to present and discuss their research and findings.