Tanda

Interweaving the formats of seminars, book clubs, research groups, and tandas, 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.

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, tanamoshi, and jamia.

An example of a tanda is as follows: A tanda is formed between six people. Each person in the tanda puts $100 into a pot every week to total a $600 pot. The first member gets the $600 pot the first week. The second member gets the next $600 pot the second week, and the third member gets the next $600 pot the third week. This continues until each member in the tanda has received the $600 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 structure, instead of waging money, participants in the Tanda program wage a topic or subject. Each participant chooses a topic or subject that they are researching 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 participant, except the one who waged the week’s topic, will research that week’s subject and regroup in every session to present and discuss their research. The member who chose the week’s topic co-facilitates the session.

Elizabeth Calvillo Dueñas – Facing Climate Change and Mass Migration Through Visual Art

Anna Cai – Disruptive Pleasure: Love as an Artistic Practice

ebere agwuncha – Creating Care-filled Igbo Architecture(s)

Alden Burke – Radicalizing Human Resource: Shifting white-supremacy based practices, systems, expectations and culture to a care-based model

Francine Almeda – Southeast Asian Disco: The Aesthetics of Optimism Under Oppression

Josué Esaú Romero Velasquez – Mesofuturism: Reclaiming Historical Identity through Archiving and Critical Fabulation

Spring 2022 was co-facilitated by Hugo Ivan Juarez

Hugo Ivan Juarez – Rasquachismo and the Underdog Mentality

Agustine Zegers – Agenciamentos Olfativos / The Agency of Scent

River Kerstetter – Pre-colonial Indigenous Urban Planning and How to Imagine Indigenous Cities of the Future

Alkebuluan Merriweather – Reconceptualizing the Madonna and Child through Archival Praxis

Marcelo Eli Sarmiento – Convictions of the Classics: On the Presence & Erasure of Black and Brown Bodies in Classic and Mesoamerican Art

Juan Arango Palacios – Neo Perreo: Challenging Misogyny and Homophobia in Reggaeton Culture

Lorena Cruz Santiago: Visual Sovereignty: Understanding the Ethics of Depicting Indigenous Culture in Visual Art

Tiffany M Johnson: Marronage: Acts Between Freedom and Captivity

Karen Dana Cohen: Making Visible the Invisible: Labor of Mothering as Immigrants in the Contemporary Culture and What Acquiring a New Language Provides

Clau Rocha: Bloodletting as Embodied Ritual: Latinx Tattoos

Alex Santana: Challenging Biometrics, AI, and Facial Recognition Technologies

Charles Ryan Long: The Love, Rage & Roses it will take to Welcome the Death of White Manhood 

Sarita Garcia: Fantasyscapes: Mercados, Markets and Merchandise; Looking in the self-made maze of Latinx flea markets

Natasha Mijares: Urban Wind Borne Debris & Environmental Racism

Marina M. Álvarez: Graffiti in the Urban Spheres of Mexico & Chile: Tools of Anti-colonial Resistance

Katia Pérez Fuentes: Cosmic Patterns for Creative Practitioners: Astrology and Art

Joseph Josué Mora: Egress: Politicized Existence In U.S. and Art Spaces

Eva Mayhabal Davis: Collaboration and Cooperative Protocols

Javier Jasso: Dreams, Alzheimer, and Autoconstrucción

Victor Zhagui: The Bossa Nova/Tropicália Movement in Brazil and Surrealism

Jennifer Ligaya Senecal: Navigating Space: Hoodoo and ATR rooted Performance Practices in the Deep South

José Rosa: Afro-Latinx Presence in Caribbean Visual Communication

Frank Vega: South American celebrations and traditions in relation to Indigenism

Elsa Muñoz: Relational theory (action) as a response to the Anthropocene

Juan Molina Hernández: Home, haven and heaven

Giselle Mira-Diaz: Generational trauma through an immigrant lens

Astro Escudero: The Plantationocene

Daye Angely: Bending perception with science and imagination