Conversations

​In the final and sixth Pride Publics Conversation, poets ​Irene Suico Soriano​ (she/her/hers/siya) and Derrick Austin​ (he/him) speak about seeking out community and rejoicing in their peers​​. When asked about ​his choice of luminary, Symone, Derrick describes seeing Symone’s drag performance in “Drag Race” — where she uplifted the do-rag –as a celebration of Black culture, a moment of joy in the midst of a difficult winter. When asked about her artistic forebears, Irene narrates her journey of finding and creating queer API and Filipino-American literary community — it began fairly isolated in the 1990s, but changed when she sought out queer API writers like R. Zamora Linmark, Justin Chin, Lisa Asagi, and started organizing API literary events. Derrick, who found Black literary community at the organization Cave Canem, notes that “poetry is a communal activity.” Irene hopes that Derrick gets his poem read by someone in particular. Symone, are you reading this? We’d all like to know.

In Pride Publics Conversation No. 5, poet/educator Rocío Carlos (she/they) and writer/performer/storyteller Ramy El-Etreby (he/him), both Native Angelenos and water (astrological) signs, talk about tenderness, authenticity, and stewardship. Rocío asks Ramy about the role of tenderness in his work. In answering, Ramy speaks of the tenderness that’s required to let people be their full, complex selves. To Ramy’s question of whether she considers herself a bruja, Rocío explains how the religious syncretism that she grew up with has led to practices that involve the stewardship of energies. In this conversation, creative practice is linked to creation and cartography–it is spiritual, social, and seeking. It’s an act of sweeping.

In this fourth Pride Publics conversation, poet, facilitator, and Libra, Jenevieve Ting (they/them) and artmaker, teacher, facilitator, and Capricorn, Jennifer Moon (they/she), speak about love and embodiment. Both Jenevieve and Jennifer chose quotes from the late scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s text, Cruising Utopia, for inclusion in the exhibition. Jenevieve also cites Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Rebecca Solnit, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and bell hooks as they discuss their understanding of love as transformational and beauty as a birthright. When asked what simple possibility looks and feels like, Jennifer focuses on embodied experience, like awareness of sound and the presence of relaxed curiosity, which help them to ground an otherwise heady orientation.

In Pride Publics conversation no 3, artists Marval A Rex (he/him) and Peter Kalisch (he/him) speak about creating performance experiences that explore discomfort as a space of growth, particularly as it relates to the queer and trans body.

They cite of artists and activists who have inspired them to create work and spaces of their own, including, for Marval: Dalí and the surrealists, and for Peter: the musician MIA, artist David Hammons, and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The two artists discuss the necessity of knowing and respecting history, as in the case of the groundbreaking work of body-based artists like Ron Athey, Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan. Peter talks about his curatorial role with QUEERSPACE in LA, where he supports queer artists who operate from the fringes, including “horrorcore” artist Marval A Rex! The conversation ends with a call for more curiosity about the things we don’t understand, a willingness to learn from each other.

In this second Pride Publics conversation, artists Cassils (they/them) and Pau S. Pescador (she/they) discuss how their evolving experiences of relating to non-binary genders, as well as shifting vocabularies and identities, inform their interdisciplinary performance and video work. In this conversation, artmaking is an agential practice, particularly for trans and non-binary individuals.

Cassils, who started out painting, speaks of their growing desire to take up a physical practice in 2011, which then led to an exploration of the possibilities afforded by duration, abstraction, and an interrogation of what it means to look.

Pau, who started out in film, speaks about reclaiming the body in her work as an “it,” — “a loved object,” and an “abstract amalgamous thing.” Trans and non-binary identities are expressed in both artists’ work as having “no resting place.”

Pride Publics artists Imani Tolliver (she/her) and traci kato-kiriyama (they/she) engage in an intimate exchange about their art practices and their lineages. The geography of the conversation traverses the Underground Railroad, Japanese-American concentration camps, and the Tongva land that they currently live on. This conversation marks the beginning of a new friendship.

Tolliver, a first-generation Los Angeleno poet, educator, and artist, speaks of the significance of hands in her work, of writing in Snoopy journals as a child, and creating word-weavings that have the dual capacity of adorning and hiding meaning.

kato-kiriyama, an artist-organizer and third-generation Japanese-American Los Angeleno, is guided back to a Buddhist Temple in South Central, to an Obon festival, where they imagine meeting their father and introducing him to their current partner.