JuPong Lin: Poetics of Repair - Being Earth, Being Water

Digital Performance, Workshops & Exhibition

Poetics of Repair is a participatory installation of poetry and paper cranes and canoes, concocting a medicine of decolonial love to mend our ravaged world.

April 2 - 22 | Free Event
Opening Performance Premiere: Friday, April 2, 4 p.m. ET, Zoom
Workshops: Fridays, April 9 & 16, 4 p.m. ET, Zoom
Closing Reception: Earth Day, Thursday, April 22, 4 p.m. ET, Zoom

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The lives of billions of people living in places already too hot for human habitation hinge on the actions of wealthy nations like ours to drawdown on greenhouse gasses immediately. The lives of 4000 Siberian Cranes hang by a thread, threatened by human destruction of their habitat. All life on earth is threatened by the toxic blend of capitalism, colonialism, and anthropogenic climate change that has ravaged our earth-home. The pandemic has added another layer to the challenge of connection. Horseshoe crabs are bled for biomedical testing to develop vaccines. Poetics of Repair invites participants to make medicine together, to fold sacred objects for our ancestors (of all species), to mend relationships with our beloved kin and our Mother Earth. The series of poems incorporates instructions for folding cranes and canoes, a practice that can awaken each of us to our interbeing with earth, sky, flora and fauna. As we fold, we become more and more connected with what we make together, until the boundary between our “self” and what we make dissolves. We are, and have always been, co-creating each other and our pluriverses. If we could all awaken to this reality—that caring of individual self is the same as caring for “other” beings, we could collectively put an end to the devastation of climate change.

JuPong will offer a live, on-line workshop and community performance on the first three Fridays in April (in solidarity with Fridays for Future) that includes a guided meditation, poetry reading and paperfolding lesson. Those interested in contributing paper cranes, canoes and/or horseshoe crabs for the installation may purchase joss paper at Tran’s World Food Market in Hadley, and mail or drop off folded objects to be incorporated in the installation.

Click here to register for any/all of the events.

Did you get your paper and make your folded canoes & cranes?
Do you want JuPong to add them to the installation?

Updates on the development of the installation can be viewed below and on JuPong’s website at www.juponglin.net. On Earth Day, April 22, 2021, JuPong will host a virtual tour of the co-created installation and a Story Circle and discussion about climate justice.

See the progression of the installation below.


 
Opening performance & workshop - April 2, 2021




Workshop - April 9, 2021




Workshop - April 16, 2021




Closing event - April 22, 2021




More images and installation progression videos coming soon and throughout the project!

Sign the Guest Book


Poetics of Repair: Being Earth, Being Water is a part of the Creative Women Leading Climate Action, a project of the Arts Extension Service, the Women of Color Leadership Network, Augusta Savage Gallery, UMass Permaculture Initiative, College of Humanities and Fine Art, and is supported by the Women’s Fund of UMass Amherst, the Department of Theater, the Sustainability, Innovation and Engagement Fund (SIEF) Fund, and individual donors.

Bio

An immigrant from Taiwan, JuPong Lin weaves her ancestral traditions into contemporary community performance, cultivating kinship between peoples of different lands, between human bodies and other-than-human bodies. As an artist, de/colonial and institutional activist and educator, she fuses story circle, qigong, and cultural somatics in a relational art that bridges personal and collective healing. JuPong enjoys finding links (metaphoric mycorrhizal) between communities, institutions, and webs of earthbeings, to enhance connections that foster personal and community resilience. Her community performance, media and installation art aspires to incite systemic change through creating relationships of mutuality and reciprocity. With collaborator, Devora Neumark, JuPong is the co-founder of Fierce Bellies, an artist collective that “envisions the mainstreaming of climate justice through joyful art practice. We engage transnational feminism to cultivate a blend of mindfulness, activism and radical aesthetics to foster transformational change and critique of the injustice of the colonial carbon economy.”