DITO LANG
✨ right here right now ~ a multi-sensory art installation by Jenn Ban utilizing interactive soft-sculpture serpents, collaborative soundscapes, scents, and visual words of affirmations to create a safe space for individual and collective healing .
Take Up the Space
Inter-generational Queer MEDIA SCREENING and ARTIST Q&A
Take Up the Space started when Momos had a vision: an intergenerational artist residency for queer & trans artists of all stripes that got them making new media-based works. After two months of planning and recruitment, with the production an producer support of Queer Rebel Production Momos launched the Queer Rebel Productions – “Taking up The Space”artist residency in July 2022. Over the two and a half months seven artists and Momos got busy creating new work, sharing their progress over WhatsApp and zoom, and giving and receiving feedback. And our presentation of new-media based work is the fabulous result.
Why does this matter? Well, first Black, Indigenous, immigrant, POC, disabled, and poor trans and queer artists need even MORE opportunities to take up space and try out new mediums free from judgment, shame, and critique. Momos’ residency did just that. In fact, most of the artists do not identify as media-makers and tonight’s artists deeply appreciated being stretched in new ways while being supported by their peers.
Second, generation upon generation upon generation of trans and queer storytellers and artists have been and will continue to claim and take up ALL the space we need to not only live our lives but to survive and thrive in a world that still hates trans and queer peoples. All seven artists tonight carry this legacy with them, and their works presented represent the generations that have come before and the ones still waiting to be born.
About the Media Based Work:
Forced2fly dedicates “Padre lo Más Sagrado”, to her father, exploring themes of life and death and the transference of energy; and “Time For a Revolution”, to women’s rights, compassion for others, humility, and resistance.
“BITAW”, from Jenn Ban, is a story captured on super8-film, documenting them in the meditative act of releasing trauma to reclaim their strength. Witnessed by intimate friends, Jenn sits meditating as her long hair is shaved off by Fenna Lang.
With Mariposa and AmihanCh’íníbaa’ Villaluna, we sit around the campfire and see ME’ME -hood (“memmay”) up close, understanding that truly Love Makes a Family.
MOOD5WING from Dustin García is a short motion comic musical about mental health following the superhero protagonist MOOD5WING as they fight the battle of the mind with rhymes. In the end it’s the LOVE within that silences GLOOM and brings peace to MOOD5WING’s inner planet panic.
Momos Cheeskos weaves together poetry and soundscapes of her vocals and original music by DF Tram by Taking Up the Space with 54 a celebration of purpose, Juicy Dreams, a reflection on desert times, “Repurposed Judgment”, is what happens when music vibe meets artist portraits, a remix of Nara Dennings Kitchen Window Experiment featuring Momos Cheeskos
Taneesh Kaur’s Feather, Part 1 of the whole Feather to Flesh, is a series of four paintings and four poems, an ekphrastic exploration of the collapse of the spirit and physical worlds and a quest to heal past trauma.
In The Dawn of Tray, Tray Smith shows how he takes up space unapologetically in the world, showcasing his queerness through multi-paced instrumentals, fluid visuals and spoken word pieces—a love letter to the strong black women who raised him.
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