Reconfiguring Movement and Place in the Wake of the Pandemic
A Five-Day Institute/ Workshop January 9-13, 2023
The Alfredo F. Tadiar Library/ PUÓN Books, Art, Design San Fernando, La Union, Philippines
Reconfiguring Movement and Place in the Wake of the Pandemic is a 5-day Institute that will gather writers, artists, and academics to workshop individual and collective critical and creative projects in progress. The aim of this intimate collaborative Institute is to support and develop works that explore the relationship between movement and place – in particular, the social and cultural practices and capacities that make the movements and places of people’s living, in a context of political and economic crisis and precarity shaped by a global pandemic and climate change, but also by the creatively persistent life capacities of people in their efforts of survival.
Movement and Place
Movements can be thought of not only as bodies changing locations but also of bodies changing forms, gestural and behavioral actions, and kinesthetic and affective dispositions. Movement can also be thought of as processes of transformation, mutation, and becoming.
Place can be thought of not only as a state-defined territory or capital-defined land (as property), but also as milieu, environment, and social role, or one’s relation to one’s condition (situation, or predicament). Place can also mean matrices of social living, platforms of people’s making which generate and enable collective life and social movements. How do people and communities mediate the movements they find themselves in and the places they inhabit? What capacities do they bring, invent, and revise to make life under changing conditions?
Projects
We welcome projects that focus on specific communities and their practices in shaping, maintaining, and changing their environments in the wake of the global pandemic and climate change. We are interested in how these practices interact with forces of power precipitating and shaping the movements people navigate for survival and livelihood – forces of power such as overseas labor contracting by global industries, capital technological development, global digital communication, land dispossession, real estate development, agribusiness, militarism, global financial markets, and commodity trade. What are the social, political, and economic histories that are implicated in and constitutive of the movements and places of people’s everyday lives? How do we represent and express alternative modalities of understanding, experiencing, and feeling, and subaltern transindividual capacities and forms of cooperative agency that people engage in that might augur other sustainable, self-determining local and planetary futures against the futures promised by authoritarian, dynastic police states and capitalist platforms?
We invite artists, scholars, teachers, activists, researchers, and beyond to share how they enact, participate in, explore, interrogate, and envision movement- and place-making.
The Workshop
During the five days, we will share and exchange feedback on works in progress in any medium. The workshop setting is designed to be conversational and collaborative, centering on ideas generated by the participants. We seek participants who are committed to creating a supportive environment where works-in- progress will be shared. The feedback method will emphasize dialogue and inquiry, centering on the intent of the author/ creator of the work-in-progress.
Participants will also participate in an online symposium during the week of the Institute.
In addition to sharing work and engaging in feedback sessions, workshop participants will also meet and interact with local partners–artists, community members, as well as environmental, educational, and cultural workers who are based in the province of La Union in the Philippines Ilocos region.
Bird’s Eye View of La Union
About San F ernando and San Juan, La Union
San Fernando, La Union is the capital of the province and the Regional Capital of the Ilocos Region (Region I). It is approximately 4 and a half hours north of Metro Manila, and situated along the coast of the West Philippine Sea. With a population of 125,640 (in 2020), San Fernando is the home of the province’s educational and medical institutions, with 12 colleges and universities and 4 hospitals, as well as regional government offices and financial centers. San Juan, the next town north of San Fernando, is considered the Surfing Capital of the Philippines and has become home to an emerging community of artists, writers, and other cultural workers.
About The Alfredo F. Tadiar Library & PUÓN
The Alfredo F. Tadiar Library is an independent research and reading library, free and open to the public, dedicated to the conservation, dissemination and advancement of knowledge in the social, cultural, and natural history, literature, and broad arts of the Northern Philippines region and its global diaspora. It acquires and preserves general and special collections of research materials relating to the diverse ethnolinguistic cultural communities native to this Philippine region and their relations in the wider world. The Tadiar Library promotes access to these materials for research and publication, lifelong learning and civic engagement, the strengthening of its communities and the enjoyment and improvement of collective life.
PUÓN Books, Arts and Design Shop offers an eclectic variety of books and items for bibliophiles, literature and arts and design lovers of all ages—from historical and contemporary local and international books to beautiful and unique gifts, souvenirs, art, and local artisanal crafts and design. All proceeds (100%) support the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library. PUÓN Event Space regularly hosts talks, panels, workshops, screenings, and other gatherings, and is a partner with nearby educational institutions including the St. Louis College and the University of the Philippines Baguio.
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS/FACILITATORS
NEFERTI X. M. TADIAR is a feminist scholar of Philippine culture and global political economy and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of the books, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004). Her most recent books are: Remaindered Life (Duke University Press, 2022), an extended meditation on the disposability and surplus of life- making under contemporary conditions of global empire, and Life- times of Becoming-Human (Everything’s Fine Press, 2022), a treatise on life expenditure and global humanity. Tadiar is founding Director of the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library and PUÓN Books, Arts, Design in San Fernando, La Union, Philippines. In this capacity, she has organized a series of artist-led creative workshops, art and community exhibitions, and cultural events, as well as embarked on the co-publication of a series of books on local history and women’s issues.
L MSP BURNS is an Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA, a land grant institution in the homeland of Gabrielino/Tongva peoples. Burns’s writings include Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Global Empire (NYU Press, 2014 Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies by the Asian American Studies Association) and the co-edited anthology California Dreaming: Place and Movement in Asian American Imaginary (2020, University of Hawai’i Press).
As a dramaturg, Burns has collaborated with BIPOC inter/ multidisciplinary theatre- and dance-makers, including David Rousseve/REALITY; Leilani Chan/TeAda Productions; Priya Srinivasan; Jay Carlon; and R. Zamora Linmark. Burns initiated a survey project assessing the impact of the pandemic on Asian American theatre organizations and individual theatre artists. This initiative grew into a team of multi-racial artists and academics, geographically based throughout the United States, broadening the surveys to gauge the impact of the pandemic on BIPOC theatre practitioners and BITOC.