We are excited to have co-presented ‘A World of Many Worlds’, a One-Day Assembly on Global Asias with Asia Forum, as part of the official Collateral Events of the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia. The one-day assembly took place on Saturday, 20 April 2024 on the first public day during opening week at the historic cultural institution Fondazione Querini Stampalia. We are proud to have supported this initiative together with Bagri Foundation.
Asymmetry
Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us. [...] In the world of the powerful there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit. — 'Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle'
Quoted by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, A World of Many Worlds, 2018
‘A World of Many Worlds’ responds to the Biennale’s theme Foreigners Everywhere, to consider what it means to acknowledge the existence of multiple worlds rather than just multiple subjects, and what it might mean to put them in relation. The conversation asks us to imagine a multiplicity of social geographies, political positions, cosmologies, aesthetic perspectives, and temporal locations, while seeing them not as incommensurable, not as universal, but as pluriversal. By doing so, we reject false notions of universalism that centre the West and merely include other narratives, politics, and modes of expression. The flowing streams of our voices are instead multiple, connecting geographies and articulating new intra-related modes of being and knowing.
These flows issue from and through Asias. Not an Asia spectacularised for global consumption, but an introspective constellation of Global Asias that looks deeply at its difficult histories of colonisation, genocide, environmental devastation, displacement, diaspora, dispossession, and war, and seeks to imagine new worlds into being through a multiplicity of positions, connections, diasporas, and solidarities. ‘A World of Many Worlds’ offers a portal into different temporalities, allowing a glimpse into hopeful transformation, surprise, and joyful encounters.
Full Programme
Registration
10am
Welcome
10.45am
Opening invocation
11am
Blowing A Feather, performance by Yao Qingmei
Yao and performers blew a feather and experimented with sound, textual fragments, rhythms of breathing, and body moments, in a spirit of levity, humour and at times frustration while keeping the feather afloat.
Conversation 1: Histories, mobilities, and intimacies in diaspora
11.20am
Isaac Chong Wai, Rachel Dedman, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Yasufumi Nakamori, Hammad Nasar, Vidha Saumya
Screening programme
1pm
Lap-See Lam & Wingyee Wu, Mother’s Tongue (2018, 17’42”)
Subash Thebe Limbu, Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous (2023, 14’50”)
Kang Seung Lee, The Heart of a Hand (2023, 13’13”)
Conversation 2: Eco-cosmologies and climate/social/racial justice
2pm
Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina, Yuko Mohri, Amol K. Patil, Sakiya, Mark Salvatus, Trevor Yeung
Garden performance followed by aperitivo
4pm
PEARLS by Joshua Serafin, excerpt performed by Lukresia Quismundo and Mario Barrantes Espinoza
PEARLS embodied through live performance a contemporary ritual of healing inspired by the non-normative genders and deities celebrated in the Philippine archipelago prior to the colonial empire, hinted by the title’s reference to ‘Perla de Oriente,’ the sobriquet attributed to the islands by the Spanish.
‘A World of Many Worlds’ is co-organised by Annie Jael Kwan, Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, Hammad Nasar, John Tain, Ming Tiampo, and Nick Yu.