Recap | Aiya Collective Workshop
Thursday, December 19, 2019
On Thursday December 19, 2019, members of aiya啊呀! held a workshop on the practice of making of tong yun and shared notes from a birdwatching experience in Chinatown, in celebration of Dongzhi 冬節 (the Winter Solstice). This workshop marked the conclusion of Noor Bhangu’s December workshop series, Has the Community Been Fed? which brought together artists, collectives and filmmakers to host events and open channels of exchange through food.
aiya啊呀!’s workshop was a gathering of community in celebration of Dongzhi 冬節 (the Winter Solstice) and highlighted the importance of collective knowledge exchange. Members of aiya啊呀! set up the gallery space to resemble a home with an open kitchen, dining room and living area, complete with furniture that Noor Bhangu had previously acquired during her curatorial residency in the summer. Participants in the workshop were given an introduction on the basics of making tong yun, and then were invited to participate in the making of dinner. Tong yun is essentially just a glutinous rice flour mixed with hot water and rolled into small balls. The spherical shape of tong yun represents unity and family togetherness, and tong yun sounds like tyun yun in Cantonese (tuan yuan in Mandarin) which means to have a reunion. Participants in the workshop helped to make both sweet and savoury tong yun, as well as vegetarian and pork dumplings. An atmosphere of community was generated through the open practice of tradition in a semi-public space.
Midway through the workshop, aiya啊呀! members discussed their findings during an urban birdwatching expedition that took place across Chinatown. The expedition circled around Chinatown in an effort to see the neighbourhood as habitat. Field notes, photos, poems and transcribed text from audio recordings were placed into a slideshow, which helped to map out the experience. The sighting of birds across Chinatown was somewhat rare, other than groups of pigeons and the occasional magpie. Often, there is such little biodiversity in urban environments that they begin to resemble deserts. The presence of the odd moose or bird of prey in an urban setting is simply an illusion to the idea that natural systems have the ability to exist here. This is most often not the case, and aside from the small number of synanthropes who coexist with humans in urban spaces, the influx of humans into any environment means that other species will be driven out. During the expedition, participants made note of the number of contradictory ways that humans interact with other species. With decoy owls and spikes or residences with dozens of birdhouses this contradictory stance exemplifies the illusory existence of urban green space, that only serves to flatter us with the impression of biodiversity.
As the concluding part Noor Bhangu’s Has the Community Been Fed? series, aiya啊呀!’s workshop was a summary of the themes that Bhangu has, and will continue to explore at Latitude 53. Themes of inclusivity across cultures, generations, species and places have been foregrounded in Bhangu’s research at Latitude 53, as a method to dream of brighter and more plausible futures. In January of 2020, Bhangu will return to Latitude 53 to present her curatorial project, even the birds are walking, with artists Areez Katki, Christina Battle, Durrah Alsaif, Elisabeth Belliveau, Emmanuel Osahor, and Lauren Crazybull. The project will centre artists that stretch inherited social visions by accommodating cross-cultural, cross-temporal and interspecial encounters. Moreover, this project will ask: When the birds take to the pavement, how can we justify our own flight?