June 11, 2025 Winter 2025
A partially complete, collage-like 3D model of a 포장마차 pojangmacha or street food cart, built out of a photograph whose warm primary colors give the emerging space a cozy evening quality.This year, we (Dri Chiu Tattersfield & Jeffrey Yoo Warren) offered our class, Relational Reconstructions, for a second year, this time with two sections – almost 40 people! As in the first year, we explored a variety of means and formats for re-connecting with ancestral and family histories, as well as navigating personal “encounters” in institutional and family archives (referencing Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s usage of the term in photographic archives).
Screenshots of the two sections of class, showing grids of smiling faces in Zoom’s gallery view, including several peace signs.It was no surprise that this year was quite different – this work is deeply linked with participants’ personal stories and relationships with archival materials, and these shape the class in important ways. But there were also sweet opportunities to revisit things we did last year; one of the most vivid was our “glue-making session,” in which we each cooked up some glue using hot water in our respective kitchens, together on Zoom.
In the process of heating water, smushing rice, stirring and finding the right consistency, we each had an opportunity to immerse ourselves in a shared sensory experience – a particular combination of smells, sounds, and textures which for some of us, carried us back to long-ago memories across many years and thousands of miles. In our class, it’s this kind of time travel, beyond the written word or the frozen scene in a photograph, which we build awareness of, and through which we expand our skills of reproduction. Many of our class projects and exercises involve such creative and experiential approaches, in addition to our deep interest in the textures of the experience of togetherness.
Another note of joy in class this year was a visit by Aisha Jandosova, who re-introduced the concept of re-existencia as she did last year. But just as our class had grown and evolved, so too has Aisha’s practice in the intervening year; she brought fresh concepts such as a close reading and unpacking of the etymology and structure of a specific Qazaq word (to be expanded upon in the upcoming inaugural issue of Babalar Press Zine) – as well as an incredible exercise in which we drew a pattern from an ancestral and archival source, and then drew it again from memory some minutes later. Aisha developed this practice as a way of passing ancestral knowledge through the body – of holding it, but also allowing it to grow within you, and to change in response to the environment of your body.
A screenshot from Aisha’s guest presentation, with the text “committing an you to memory, recalling it over & over.” The left side shows a black-and-white photo of an intricate Kazakh rug pattern. The right side shows four evolving iterations of Aisha’s recreation of the pattern from memory, labeled “original”, “1 day later”, “4 days later,” and “416 days later.”We also spent time building skills in 3D modeling – but not the usual kind. While Mozilla Hubs was, since our last class, shut down (sob), we did our 3D modelmaking work in SketchUp, which was less social, but still up to the kind of messy collage work we need to model memory spaces. This kind of modelmaking is more like building with clay, or scrapbooking with fragments of memory; it’s more organic, and more personal. We push and pull parts of a photograph, clone and stretch and stitch together bits and pieces to draw ourselves into the scene, and to wrap it around ourselves like the chewed up pulp of a wasp nest. As always, we were incredibly moved by the work participants produced, and honored by their willingness to share quite personal images and reflections within the class.
A screenshot from the example SketchUp model created by Jeff, based on a sepia-toned image of Korean workers from a 1903 stereograph, beginning to be built outwards into a 3D collage.For our final project, we wanted to create a container that could encompass the many mediums participants had worked in throughout the class, from SketchUp modeling to paper collage to poetry and soundscape design. More importantly, we wanted its structure to reflect the collective journey of the class: how we shared small pieces of ourselves with each other each week and learned from each others’ questions and uncertainties, individual ancestral reconnection journeys becoming intertwined. We ended up with something that looks a little like a collage of collages, a little like a zine (defined… expansively!), and a little like a map. Each participant’s memory enclaves are tessellated together to form a map that, when printed and cut out, will form a winding, connected path of memories, and folds up to fit in your pocket. We hope it feels like taking a walk through a neighborhood. We hope it feels like making glue.
Throughout the class, amidst encounters with institutional archives mishandling precious photos and documents, we grappled frequently with questions about when, how, and with whom we wanted to share our work. Thus, we wrote a Poetic Terms & Conditions text together as a set of guidelines on how to share and interact with the document - such as “When you carry them around in your pocket, please check on them from time to time by slipping your hand in to feel their pages. ”
Our full final project won’t be shared online; instead, each participant will receive a few copies to share in-person with people and spaces they trust. Perhaps a copy will find its way to you. In the meantime, some participants have allowed us to share their work below. Please take a few deep breaths and spend some time with each one. In the print version of the final project, there are several templates left blank, so that readers might collage their own memory enclave and add it to the chain. Consider this an invitation: we’d love for you to make one too!
Screenshot of SketchUp model for final project. A speculative landscape of Daecheon Beach, South Korea in the late 1960’s. The collage begins from a family photo, and the landscape is extended using images from a newspaper archive, and personal photos. Women in white walk on the beach selling seafood, and a group of students pose for a group photo. To the right, the mountain horizon is “completed” with a painted ceramic artwork. (Tracy Lee)
A poem titled 'roots' split across two images, written in white text on a black background. The poem reflects on themes of identity, heritage, environmental grief, and resilience. The first stanza begins with 'i am made of mother', celebrating maternal lineage and peranakan sambal belacan. The second continues with 'i am made of air chairs, oceans / emancipated from every pore', reflecting on migration, diversity, and overcoming isolation. Then a transition into the third stanza with 'i am made of mangrove shores / that miss the mekong,' witnessing neocolonial land reclamation and complicity in a violent food system. Lastly, the concluding stanza charts ongoing transformation and becoming, closing with 'generational callouses / unwind. meadowlark alights / singing.' (Jerald Lim)
This diorama imagines an enclave in Gojjam, Ethiopia, in the late 19th century. The background—lush greens and mountain ranges—is a collage of personal photos taken during a recent trip to Ethiopia. Including these images was a way of connecting past and present: artefacts from my search for hidden foremothers. In the foreground is an illustration of an Oromo mother and child, imagined as my great-grandmother and her mother. They are nestled within a small settlement scattered with huts. The child is carried on her mother’s back in a handwoven cloth as she roasts coffee over an open fire. Mother and daughter belong to each other. They keep each other safe, warm -an enclave within an enclave. This love is how hard spaces can become soft. (Abigail Salole)
Frame of a house with a window marked by a spray painted white "all ok" on the windowpanes. The body of the house has been replaced with still water reflecting yellow and red houses, mimicking rising flood water. The house and the water are from the remains and consequences of Hurricane Katrina affecting the Gulf Coast of Mexico in 2005 and still, today. (Yasmine Raouf)
A cracked, grey-and-brown cement terrace floor wet with recent rain leads to an even-more-cracked black and grey cement wall, crumbling with age. Built into the terrace floor on the left is a small, square skylight, peeking in to the lives of those living in the apartment below. To the left is a lush, green jungle as well as some smaller village buildings, and in the distance, backlit by a cloudy sunset, are the rolling hills of the Yercaud hill station. To the right is the doorway to another home, and on the packed earth in front of the doorway stands a mama cow, nose to nose with her young calf. A woman is crouched next to the cow, preparing to milk her, and closely watching is a young Indian girl, with her sibling peering out cautiously from behind her. (Bhavna Mahadevan)See Bhavna’s soundscape here:
(Video description: In a sunny kitchen, a woman in a gray oversized hoodie scoops coffee into a small steel filter coffee percolator, fills it with boiled water, then mixes the resulting coffee decoction with heated milk by pouring the mixture it back and forth between a steel cup and a steel bowl.)
"The Secret Life of a Game recounts the journey of the Oware board and game pieces from the coast of West Africa to the shores of the Caribbean. The board, over 40 years old, was carved out of a single block of wood and represents a sacred space for Afro-centered kinship and diasporic social interaction. The pieces are seeds from the Guilandina bonduc, an indigenous plant in Ghana. Surrounding the hand holding the game piece includes photos of the ocean from Cape Coast, Ghana and Cousin's Cove, Jamaica. The game's website holds more information." (Naa Koshie Mills)