03/30 – Facing Climate Change and Mass Migration Through Visual Art
Elizabeth Calvillo Dueñas

It’s an undeniable fact that our world’s climate will change. Yet, there’s little understanding or preparation as to how climate change will shape the demographics of our world. In the Pacific Northwest, summer of 2020 saw not only the pandemic, but also endless days of smoke-filled air, ash on cars and unnatural orange sunsets. These past few years, I’ve realized that this process is already beginning, but is going unnoticed. 

I’m interested in researching this topic further to gain a better understanding of how climate change will shape our daily lives in the US. How will politics and our economy change? What will happen when cities cease to exist in the coming years? And in all of this, what role is art playing in this global process? Can it do anything? Should it?

04/06 – 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.

04/13 – Creating Care-filled Igbo Architecture(s)
ebere agwuncha

There are key links from the Igbos of Nigeria that have informed some of the present architecture(s) that we see today. This project, Creating Care-filled Igbo Architecture(s), celebrates the intersections of architecture, design, craft, and art in the Igbo sphere (and beyond) through a dexterous practice exploring various inquiries including: food preservation, visual literature, rainwater collection, and extrusion/intrusion architecture. The word architecture(s) has been adapted to also include object design, functional structures, and visual literature.

With the support of Tanda, I am motivated to continue development for this project through research, writing, making and conceptual modeling. The methods for this period remain flexible yet intentional with an aim to also pull from secondary sources such as digital curated archives (ie.Ụ́kpụ́rụ́ Tumblr Page) that involve community discussions and historical images. My current goals are to form iterative speculative responses along with care-filled architectures and an ongoing visual catalog. I ask for peer support and discussions to expand the modes of data collection, guide written synopsis, and refine the baseline definition of architecture(s). Through this ongoing process, I wonder how an approach of “hybridity” can be a method to acknowledge varying cultures, narratives and practices for building our present futures.

04/20 – Radicalizing Human Resource: Shifting white-supremacy based practices, systems, expectations and culture to a care-based model
Alden Burke

In all of my roles–Annas, Chicago Arts Census, Design for America–my work centers around a foundational question: How might behavioral and structural practices of care, collaboration, and the commons inform group dynamics in our working dynamics?

An initial understanding of these questions led me to believe that a proposed methodology of using care, commons, and collaboration to create healthier labor conditions and practices would vary based on the size, scale, values, and goals for each organization. My research hopes to uncover foundational pillars of this work that might serve as anchors for these organizations. They include (in no particular order as of right now):

(1) Trust-Based Networks: The individual and group relationships with a foundation of trust that affect the way we live and labor.This includes but is not limited to:

(2) Sustainable Labor Practice: Laws, regulations, structures, and habits that contribute to healthy and sustainable livelihoods, both at work and in our personal lives.

(3)Shared Ambition and Values: Organization values and goals align with personal values, goals, and convictions:

(4) Equitable Power Structures: Shifting the focus on short-term programmatic band-aides (i.e. implicit bias training, employee affinity groups) to practices that address larger system inequalities.

04/27 – Southeast Asian Disco: The Aesthetics of Optimism Under Oppression
Francine Almeda

Southeast Asian music throughout the early to late 1970’s emerged from a tumultuous era – martial law gripped the Philippines, the Vietnam War was underway, the genocide of the Khmer Rouge occurred, the anti-communist purge under Suharto in Indonesia was still fresh, and Myanmar’s ongoing political and cultural isolation was at its height. And yet, throughout this time, Southeast Asia was producing a new genre of music which voiced a funky, melodic style that seemed to yearn for another place and time. The dissonance of this music and its contemporary political era is of deep interest and significance. 

How can record covers act as visual artifacts that speak to the optimism of this time? What role did music play in escapism under oppression? How are aesthetics adopted and then adapted? Through studying Manila Sounds, specifically,  (the music that emerged from the Philippines) I aim to contextualize this as it is linked to the rippling effects of colonialism and American influences.

05/04 -Mesofuturism: Reclaiming Historical Identity through Archiving and Critical Fabulation
Josué Esaú Romero Velasquez

How would Mesoamerican civilization have developed without colonial genocide? How would Meso-values and culture influence and guide the development of technology, urbanity, and generally our relationship to the earth, resources, and each other? What can their cultural / experiential knowledge offer to our present civilization and the futures we need? And how can I channel their values and knowledge in my studio work and daily life, grounding a decolonial presence / prescience ? 

These questions are framed in a futurist context akin to Afrofuturism and broader Latinx-futurisms, but concerned specifically with speculative mesoamerican work. I am searching for existing artistry and scholarship to focus a cohesive vision of what exists as a resource for myself and other Mesos looking to expand these futures.