Workshops
We view our workshops as collaborations. We will offer artistic/creative teachings we have gathered over time, and/but it is important to us that workshops be shaped by participants. You will be coming with lots of knowledge, thoughts, ideas, references and experiences, and we seek to create learning environments that honour your many knowings. We believe strongly that our role as facilitators involves working with and alongside you as you to discover your way into the work.
We are currently building curriculum for a number of workshops. Please see below for current workshops, and stay tuned for more announcements of workshops to come.
WORLD OF Q WORKSHOP
World of Q is a sci-fi art & story-making quest where those of us on the fringe will survive & thrive. We will art our way towards badass visions of our futures through a blend of creative writing, visual art, & mixed-media collage activities.
This workshop is for those of us who want to go where so few mainstream sci-fi stories journey into: to highlight underrepresented visions of the future, while undoing the misrepresented ones; to reclaim what has been fragmented and scattered across space and time in the hands of mainstream media-makers who so often fail to write “the marginalized” into the forefront of their visions of the future; and ultimately, to write us, into the survival of humanity, where we play the heroic protagonists who are active agents in futurebuilding, carving out new beginnings from the wreckage of pre/post apocalyptic worlds/landscape.
In this workshop we will make media using written word, images, movement, video and more.
Some of the questions we are looking to explore are: how can we heal intergenerational trauma by re-imagining the future on our own terms? What does it look like to re-frame our visions of the future from our own perspectives by drawing from our own magic/herstories/mythologies/cosmologies? What do our dystopias/utopias look like in light of impending or possible technological and scientific shifts?
iOUR NENE’S STORIES
Join us for a writing and interdisciplinary arts workshop where we will imagine into the past, integrate our experiences in the present, and vision into the future.
This workshop is for those of us who crave to connect to the stories of the people we come from. It is for those of us that have access to some of those stories, and for those of us that don’t. For those of us who live in diasporic communities and question our relationship to our ancestors and homelands. For those of us that want to connect more deeply to the histories of the lands we currently live on. For those of us that want to acknowledge the legacies and ongoing realities of genocide, on the lands we live on, and the lands our ancestors are from. This workshop is for all of us who believe that storytelling and art can be transformative tools used towards bridging the longing in our hearts and the political realities that have given cause to these longings.
Backstory: Dear Armen came out of a collaborative storytelling journey. We(Kamee Abrahamian and lee williams boudakian) set out to recover the legacy of Armen Ohanian. Born from a desire for herstorical representations of feminist Armenians that we are descendents from, we began a myth-making process integrating historical fact, imagined and intuitive rememberings, combined with our contemporary realities as queer and trans Armenians trying to make sense of our place inside the struggles within and beyond our communities. What came out of this process is Dear Armen. With this workshop, we want to share our process and be part of facilitating your own journeys of reclamation and remembering.