Relational Reconstructions: Personal Reconnection, Creativity, and Immersive Counter-Archival Practices with Jeffrey Yoo Warren

Description

Jeffrey Yoo Warren, a Korean diasporic artist educator, woodworker, illustrator, community scientist, and researcher, will give a talk titled "Relational Reconstructions: Personal Reconnection, Creativity, and Immersive Counter-Archival Practices" for the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center.

Experiences with archives—their gaps and harms—can be both painful and fruitful for people of color, as despite themselves, these materials offer glimpses into possible pasts and futures. Drawing inspiration from Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation, Linda Sue Park's craft-based reconnection narratives, and Adolfo Albán Achinte's re-existencia, Yoo Warren and collaborators craft multisensory immersions to develop relationships with possible ancestors, using archival records as building materials. This approach, called "relational reconstruction," involves working generatively around archival gaps to weave ancestral spaces into our lives through a variety of digital and print techniques.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism.

About the Speaker

Jeffrey Yoo Warren (he/him) is a Korean diasporic artist educator, woodworker, illustrator, community scientist, and researcher in Providence, RI, whose work combines ancestral craft practices and creative work with diasporic memory through virtual collaborative worldbuilding. He has spent years creating collaborative community science projects which decenter dominant culture in environmental knowledge production. Yoo Warren is an educator with Movement Education Outdoors and AS220 as well as part of the New Old art collective with Aisha Jandosova; he was also the 2023-4 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. His current artistic practice investigates how people build identity and strength through their interactions with artifacts and histories and the ways that objects can tell stories that people can be part of in the present.