FLUX FACTORY projects:
American Alien
New episodes posted here on August 12th, September 9th, and September 29th.
American Alien, a project developed by Flux Factory Artist-in-Residence Ye Taik, is designed to increase awareness of the Burmese diaspora and to serve as a platform for the Burmese American voice. Through interviews published as podcasts on the Flux Factory website, American Alien will address topics related to Burmese innovation and hybridity.
Comprised of conversations with Burmese American intellectuals and prominent artists of Burmese descent, this project questions notions of individual identity and belonging in a country, which from its very beginning, has been inhabited by displaced people: immigrants, outsiders, refugees, third culture kids and third culture adults. In this light, America’s unifying characteristic is one of difference.
Ye Taik has written the following statement about this project:
As a post-nationalist who resides in Brooklyn, I am very interested in exploring the progressive definition of Home. Culture is an organism that expands and contracts, that breathes within the context of the relationships of people with all different skin colors, all different tones and accents, all different perspectives and all different emotional landscapes. As diverse as Americans are, many people of color are still culturally underrepresented.
The series of three episodes includes interviews with New York-based curator and artist,Tun Myaing; the Library of Congress Florence Tan Moeson Fellow and Burmese American Collective Director, Saw Sandi Tun; and Co-founder of Sulu DC, as well as “proud Burmese American Gypsy,” Simone Jacobson.
Tun Myaing transformed from a high school gang member into an artist and curator whose work highlights the unusual circumstances of his childhood and the juxtaposition of ordinary mundane things with extraordinary internal conflicts.
Interviewer Alethea Vasilas practices west african dance, post-modern dance theater, and butoh ritual movement. She has recently become a master of cultural anthropology and currently cultivates an organic vegetable farm, continuously orienting herself towards creation. She hopes one day to coalesce an experimental Art Farm that would bring together movement, ecology, emotion, nourishment, and sublimation.