braiding the future
“Our body is molded to fit the land,” fae said. “There’s something about our bodies that we carry a geographical location, a bloodline, something cosmic as well. We don’t carry just memory or trauma. We carry all the past lives we’ve had. We carry all the untold stories that haven’t been expressed yet.”
live performance + social practice, 44 minutes. commission for the land we carry, El Salon at Casa Familiar, San Ysidro.
braiding the future is an ongoing socially engaged environmental performance project that activates hair braiding as ancestral technology and ecological metaphor. The project responds to intensified ICE raids in the San Diego–Tijuana borderlands by cultivating embodied solidarity among women, trans, and gender-nonconforming communities in the South Bay region.
The first iteration occurred in San Ysidro, where three strands of red thread were braided durationally beneath a halo of suspended sagebrush. Participants braided one another’s hair from this central red braid, forming a human spiral under the soundscape of circling helicopters and prayer songs. The ritual performance is offered to the militarized landscape, using collective joy as a way of protesting against the ongoing corruption of unlawful deportation.
the wind was just like them
live performance + installation, 8 minutes. Commission for LIMINAL SPACE at The Mingei International Museum + Disco Riot at Queer Mvmt Festival, San Diego.
the wind was just like them is an interdisciplinary performance that combines live vocals distorted into an electrical fan and experimental movement with a dozen eggs. The ritual uses body languages of trans joy to subconsciously detonate the 35 million landmines still hidden in the countryside of Vietnam after the Vietnam War (1955-1975). With the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, I question one’s displaced and diasporic relationship to homeland. Using the traditions of my paternal grandmother, I research Daoist martial patterns, especially the concept of spirals and unicity, to help express the freedom for re-narrating memories of sudden death.
Homework
live performance + installation, 11 minutes. Commission for Queering the Table at the Mingei International Museum, San Diego.
Homework reclaims bodily safety by exposing histories of child abuse in Vietnamese and diasporic immigrant communities. Audiences contemplates how violent discipline is stored in collective skin, and remains repetitively cursed in the body for generational patterning. I re-program body-pain relationships by transforming the object-hood of brooms with somatic sequences of “sweep-walking” and resting. The performance seals with an artist talk where I facilitate a grieving circle through poetry recitation.
can’t you just change jobs
“She moves both elegantly and ungainly within a performance, rendering moments of both instinctive reaction and designed transcendence. ”
live performance + sculpture, 11 minutes. Commision for PROJECT [BLANK], a performance exhibition at Bread & Salt + the closing performance of 17th Annual Dia de la Mujer at The FRONT Arte & Cultura. 2024. seventeen braided “Thank You” bags into a frozen durian fruit, and an improvised hair pin.
can’t you just change jobs compels audiences with an ode to Vietnamese women and fruit sellers. I release the generational inheritance of lethargy, scarcity, and childbirth by wrestling with a metaphorical ball and chain crafted from supermarket goods. The ritual uses a chant, mua cho bà con ơi / oh child, buy these from me (because I need the money), in repetition as a labor prayer to engage with audience members as passerby customers.
Yet another birth of
live performance + installation, 33 minutes after a 30 day sugar fast. Commission for the closing performance for Through the Maze, in collaboration with Tarrah Aroonsakool, at The Athenaeum Center, San Diego.