building bricks for communal healing, 2016 – ongoing
tea bags drank by myself and many people, thread, hair, approx. 3.75 x 2.25 x 7.75 in. each brick
building bricks for communal healing, started in 2016 during the Trump election period. As I sat with friends in the studio trying to make sense of the non-sense in the news we drank tea and spoke of the effects this election would have. During this time I was going through archived family photographs and noticed my parents army backpacks – in a trans in the studio I began folding the used tea bags into similar forms. I began the project living in Boston and it reminded me of the Boston Tea Party. The Feminist Tea Party is composed of readings and gatherings between feminists, persons of color, immigrants, non-binary persons, and anyone identifying with the project.
I would like to further develop this work in collaboration with the Albanian and immigrant community in nearby neighborhoods. The aim in having the Feminist Tea Party continue in the States is to merge efforts in thinking about ideas of queer-femme-national identity while reading important feminist texts together and dissecting them as we drink tea together and make them into forms of a brick–dating back to 7000 BC as one of the oldest building materials, as well as conjuring up the Boston Tea Party. I plan to create a series of live performances and social-practice based work on my co-mutated-creative interventions in various spaces. These concepts will be extended through a selection of readings meant to further understand the doubling vision of intervention, motivation, praxis, materiality and content with the problematic incongruities between individual political self-hood, mass cultural inheritance and political power. The specifics of the work will develop from collaborative exploration with other collaborators.
