Diasporic Memories

A conversation between interdisciplinary artists: Francisca Khamis Giacoman, Dorothy Wong Ka Chung, and Benjamin Ryser discuss navigating in-between identities and listening as a relational practice.

Histories of migration and displacement are stories of “in-between”: in between spaces, languages, memories, and cultures. Being in-between sometimes means feeling absence, sometimes sensing a richness of relations, and sometimes navigating between building anew and reconnecting to the past all at once. The search for ways of connecting despite distance evokes many questions: how can we be part of our community’s collective memory without physically participating in it? How might imagination and fiction heal past and present realities of violence and oppression?

Francisca, Dorothy, and Benjamin work with various media including sound, performance, image, video, installation, and storytelling as a relational practice. In bridging time and space through oral history, centering intimate objects as carriers of memories, and activating relations through listening, they mediate questions of identity, redefine singular notions of home, and create other senses of belonging. In Diasporic Memories, they will share their experiences working with stories from Palestine, Chile, Hong Kong, and Switzerland, and give insights into their practices with artistic spaces and public sites.

Educators In Correspondence is a moderated conversation between practitioners exploring feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist approaches to design education and practice. It aims to create dialogue through difference, with each conversation pairing positions from across cultural, geographical, and linguistic contexts.

Francisca Khamis Giacoman (she/her) is an artist and designer based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Coming from the Palestinian diaspora in Chile, she dives into her own family archive to question the possibilities present within the representation and reproduction of memories. Through performances, installations, and audiovisual works, she delves into fragmented diasporic narratives, blurring the line between fiction and materiality. Francisca is also the co-founder of Espacio Estamos Bien, an art cooperative in Amsterdam that curates gatherings, publications, and exhibitions. Currently, she leads the development of a support initiative for non-European students at the Sandberg Instituut and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

Benjamin Ryser and Dorothy Wong Ka Chung 黃加頌 (o!sland) are a Hong Kong/Swiss artist duo whose community research art projects connect with local communities in different countries. Through images, videos, sound, text, and stories, they show current society and politics from personal perspectives. They have lived and worked together with Hong Kong immigrants around the world, the local Hong Kong community, the Truku indigenous people in Taiwan, and a community of refugees in Zurich, Switzerland. Their research focuses on issues of belonging, migration, identity, imagined homelands, and their relationship to politics and history.

Image: Collage of a photograph by Francisca Khamis Giacoman (left) and part of the work Why Are You Here? by Dorothy Wong Ka Chung and Benjamin Ryser (right).

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