Co-curated with CAO Collective, Xiran Tan, and Loren Yuehan Wang
March 5th, 2023, Ezra and Cecile Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, CTCo-sponsorsed by The College of East Asian Studies, The Resource Center, Fries Center for Global Studies and Center for the Humanities
Press Release:
“Stitching Radical Friendship — Chinese Artists and Organizers’ Collective Visit to Wesleyan”, By Xiran Tan
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Stitching Radical Friendship offered a retrospective of lived experience of how young artists and community organizors participated in global political resistance in 2022. It was a participatory artist conversation in circling and stitching with Chinese Artists and Organizers Collective (CAO): a group of diasporic feminists explores radical friendship to queer and counter heteropatriarchy and state structures.Throughout the events, the organizers and CAO artists explored how friendship can be a form of radical collectivity that defies the separating of humanity and truncating of relationships that states and racial capitalism seek to impose. Participants discussed how friendship had the potential to break away from the liberal pretense of care and the patriarchal, heteronormative nuclear family. Friendship seeks an alternative, feminist narrative to the masculine heroism in social movements. The experimental attempt at such collectivity is hopefully felt through or embodied by the stitching and other practices shared in the workshop.
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