Unsettled/Soiled Group

Image Description: A photograph of the top part of a building through a worm’s-eye view. The multi-family apartment building has 3 units side by side, and in the picture 2 stories are visible. In front of the building, the top part of a street lamp can be seen. Behind the building, a gray sky.

We are a group of East, Southeast, and South Asian diasporic movers, makers, and settlers on Ramaytush and Chochenyo Ohlone land. What brought us together is a shared desire to unlearn and resist Asian settler colonialism on Turtle Island. We aspire to be an open and porous community–we want to build relationships with you.

About this Project

Part immersive theater and part community gathering, Dwelling for Unsettling interrogates and resists the entanglement of the diasporic and the settler colonial for Asian diasporic communities on Turtle Island. Incorporating performance altars, embodied testimonies, public rituals, and audio-visual installations, Dwelling for Unsettling attends to the stakes of embodiment in a settler colony—How have we inherited settler colonialism in our bodies as a modality of moving/being? What might be the kinesthetic strategies to denaturalize and destabilize the settler body and its movement tradition? Drawing from archival studies, family histories, and movement research, this project is an invitation to imagine new embodied senses of who we are and how we move in Asian diasporas that refuse further incorporation into the settler colonial project.

About the collaborators:

June Yuen Ting dreams of another world that the confines of colonial capitalist modernity cannot hold. June dances, organizes, agitates, and grieves. They want for all those who survived the violence of western imperialism and white supremacy a fighting chance of loving one another against the colonial imperative of heteropatriarchy.

Dilpreet Anand is a multimedia projection and meditative sketch based visual artist with ancestral roots in Punjab, currently living on Chochenyo Ohlone land (Oakland, California). They use their creative practice to access healing through flow states, creating immersive pattern work that allows viewers a slowing and subversion of colonized time.

Emily Engelking-Rappeport loves lists and: mini watercolors, late-night fusion dancing, granite climbs, tidepools, road trips, skinny-dips, type 2 adventures, decorating birthday cakes, kitty cuddles, taking photos of friends, making dinner w/Bryce, circus, skiing, writing letters, poetry, emergent strategy, collaborative art, naps, pothos, ferns, weather, deer, stories, phone calls w/mom.

Cristina M. Ibarra is a 2nd-generation San Franciscan, theater artist, and educator. They work in high school mental health, exploring spaces for storytelling therapy in SFUSD. Ibarra loves dimsum, skateboarding, and the fog.

Ye Qing Jiang is a creative raised in the Bay Area and currently based in the PNW. Their creative background spans restorative justice organizing, basement kombucha brewing, educational equity community building, Southeast Asian food making, and domestic violence navigating. Ye Qing brings tenacity, presence, clarity, humility, curiosity, and creativity to all their projects.

John-Mario Sevilla hails from Kaʻehu, Paukūkalo, Maui, and is a student of the hula with Kumu Hula Hōkūlani Holt (Pāʻū O Hiʻiaka), Kumu Hula June Ka‘ililani Tanoue (Hālau I Ka Pono) and Kawika Alfiche (Hālau O Keikialiʻi). He is the Director at Large of Luna Dance in Berkeley. His folks are from the Philippines.

tashi tamate weiss (she/they) is a storyweaver and energy worker of Japanese and Ashkenazi descent, born and raised on Ramaytush Ohlone land. Their work with words, movement, music and film bends genre/space/time, moving fluidly between the mundane and the mystical. A reiki practitioner, taiko drummer, performance artist and ceremonialist, tashi supports the reanimation of our relationships with the spirit, plant, animal and cosmic realms.