Diasporic Dialogues is a speaker series that highlights the work of artists/makers working through a Southeast Asian diasporic lens. Speakers will share and reflect on their work in order to open broader conversations about the alliances, fissures, and discoveries that different creative practices can reveal when representing Southeast Asian diasporic experience.

Post-Colonial Hot-Ones is a panel series that is centered around sharing meals, ideas, and experiences by community members about liberation, transformation and resilience within arts education. These discussions were focused around communal knowledge sharing, tools for resistance, intergenerational healing methods, mobilization plans for marginalized voices, and recipes for dishes/sauces. Our first installment of this series included participation from Ryan Rice, Camille Turner, Casey Mecija, Patricio Dávila, Immony Mén, and audience members.

tender curiosities is a Toronto-based workshop that offers participants methods of play while investigating identity politics within dance-technological mediums and textural writing research. Through intersensorial engagement, participants will be able to experiment with movement art through text-based and somatic-driven explorations, as well as interdisciplinary modes of recording (both image and sound). The workshop will also offer interpersonal research methods and engage with auto-ethnographic storytelling inspired by facilitator, Jasmine Liaw’s recent experimental film, xīn nī 廖芯妮. Tapping into an archive informed by movement - tender curiosities invites participants to play: as a practice of reciprocity and wandering through the lens of the Asian diasporic body.

Dias:stories is continuing its exploration in identifying alternative means of sharing stories rooted in the Asian Diaspora.

Guided by Dias:stories member and sound artist apé Aliermo, participants will delve into personal histories, meaning-making and storytelling, while learning basic techniques in listning, field recording and experimental sound composing.

It’s a new year, its winter, what better time to share stories of togetherness rooted in the South-East Asian Diaspora?!

South East Asia is a very culturally diverse region, but somewhere in one’s migrant story, there is some kind of shared togetherness. It could be for cultural reasons, it could be as a means for survival in a new place. What one of your early memories of togetherness? What is one of your meaningful photos from back in the day?

Was it your grandpa babysitting you amidst the foreign winter snow? Was it your downstairs neighbour selling homemade food from their apartment to the rest of the building? Was it your mom making unlikely friends at a new job? Was it your newly arrived auntie apple picking with the rest of the family for the first time?

Post an old photo depicting togetherness and tag @dia.stories.

What is the story in this image? What does this picture tell us about togetherness in your past? Does this image tell us anything about migrating from the homeland to Turtle Island? How is it connected to where you and/or yours currently are? What does it mean to you?

Join us for a Diasporic Dialogues panel event celebrating the work of participants from the Future Through Memory workshop. Artists: Axe Binondo, Beau Gomez, Marie Sotto and Siyao (Jane) He will be discussing their creative practices and workshop experiences.

Participants of the Ancestral Memory Enclaves workshop guest hosted by Jeffrey Yoo Warren had their work exhibited at the Seeing Providence Chinatown Exhibition in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Seeing Providence Chinatown is an in-progress project using archival photography and maps to build an immersive digital 3D model of historic downtown Providence Chinatown, building on the work of the RI Chinese History project by Angela Yuanyuan Feng, Julieanne Fontana, John Eng-Wong and others. The process of reconstructing the neighborhood’s building exteriors and streets will weave together and interlink the relatively few images remaining of this once-vibrant enclave, of which almost no trace remains today.

Future Through Memory is a virtual participatory workshop that explores themes of personal memory and East and Southeast Asian diasporic experience through methods of oral testimony, transmedia, and digital storytelling.

All applications will be anonymized and peer juried. Six applicants will be chosen to participate.

All participants will receive an honorarium of $1080 at completion of workshop.*
*CAD. Additional details and information to follow in the application process

Join Dias:stories for the latest installment of our Diasporic Dialogues series featuring the creators of Venba, a narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian immigrant mom, who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s.

Abhi and Sam are game developers in Toronto who are interested in using video games as a medium to convey unique stories and interactions.

In Venba, players will cook various dishes and restore lost recipes, hold branching conversations and explore in this story about family, love, loss and more.

Join Dias:stories at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2022 for the inaugural launch of our speaker series Diasporic Dialogues featuring producer and director, Jeanette Kong.

Kong’s critically acclaimed catalogue of short-form videos and documentaries highlights the everyday histories and intimacies of Caribbean Chinese diaspora and genealogy. Her most recent film, A Brief Record of My Father’s Time at Sea (2022) recounts the story of her father’s migration from China to Jamaica and then to Toronto, Canada. Kong’s work importantly archives stories from the Chinese-Jamaican diaspora and we are so excited to provoke inquiry into what inspires her creative practice.