Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Illegal: the Theater of the Angel Island Immigration Station’s Paper Sons | Skyler Chin, Jeffrey Lo, and Sita Sunil (Fall 2022 Speaker Series)

Lecture, 73 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance)

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Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public Friday, October 21, 2022

Speakers: Skyler Chin and Sita Sunil, Playwrights of Illegal; Jeffrey Lo, Director of The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin, Playwright

One island, two plays: Skyler Chin and Sita Sunil will discuss their new musical Illegal with Filipino-American playwright Jeffrey Lo, who recently directed The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin, which like Illegal dramatizes the family traumas created by racially exclusionary policies carried out at Angel Island. Skyler Chin was inspired to co-write Illegal by his own ancestors’ experiences at Angel Island, and Sita Sunil’s work as an artist is also shaped by her family’s history of immigration. In addition to his directing work, Jeffrey Lo’s playwriting often deals with issues of Asian American identity. This will be a stimulating conversation across generations and genres.

UC @Berkeley Arts + Design Fridays: Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration, and Resistance is a lively series of talks by artists, performers, scholars, and activists exploring themes of global and US migration, exclusion, and belonging. It is also a UC Berkeley course offered as Humanities 20: Explorations of Art + Design. Organized by Susan Moffat, Creative Director of Future Histories Lab and Executive Director of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative and by Lisa Wymore, Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and Faculty Advisor of Berkeley Arts + Design. Hosted by Susan Moffat.

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This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.

A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Preventing Erasure: How the Angel Island Immigration Station Was Saved | Ed Tepporn (Fall 2022 Speaker Series)

Lecture, 76 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance)

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Friday, September 16, 2022 Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public

Speaker:

Ed Tepporn, Executive Director, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation

Description: Angel Island in San Francisco Bay is a crucial spot marking the history of exclusionary, race-based immigration policy. Its immigration station has sometimes been called “the Ellis Island of the West.” But Angel Island was an ambivalent gateway, a place of incarceration and exclusion for migrants as well as an entry for half a million newcomers from 80 countries, mostly from Asia. Despite its significance, this important historical site was almost lost. Ed Tepporn will discuss how activists saved this site, current day efforts, and its meaning for the future.

UC @BerkeleyArtsDesign Fridays: Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration, and Resistance is a lively series of talks by artists, performers, scholars, and activists exploring themes of global and US migration, exclusion, and belonging. It is also a UC Berkeley course offered as Humanities 20: Explorations of Art + Design. Organized by Susan Moffat, Creative Director of Future Histories Lab and Executive Director of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative and by Lisa Wymore, Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and Faculty Advisor of Berkeley Arts + Design. Hosted by Susan Moffat.

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This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.

A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration | Julio Morales (Fall 2022 Speaker Series)

Lecture, 75 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance)

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Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public Friday, November 4, 2022

Speaker: Julio Morales, Artist and Curator

Description: Curator Julio Morales talks about his current BAMPFA exhibition, Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration, which considers the cultures and institutions of confinement that have been centuries in the making. The exhibition features newly commissioned works based on art historical images of incarceration. The twelve contemporary artists in the exhibition—Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, Juan Brener, Raven Chacon, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ashley Hunt, Sandra de la Loza, Michael Rohd, Paul Rucker, Xaviera Simmons, Stephanie Syjuco, Vincent Valdez, Mario Ybarra Jr.—invest in community collaboration, work in an expansive range of media, and rethink traditional archival research to consider how artistic expression reveals the underlying logics of criminality and correction.

Julio César Morales, by deploying a range of media and visual strategies, investigates issues of migration, underground economies, and labor on the personal and global scales. Morales’ practice explores diverse mediums specific to each project or body of work. He has painted watercolor illustrations that diagram human trafficking methods, employed the DJ turntable, produced video and time-based pieces, reenacted a famous meal–all to elucidate social interactions and political perspectives.

Morales’ artwork has been shown at venues internationally, including; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; MUCA Roma, Mexico City; Prospect 3 Biennale, New Orleans, LA; Lyon Biennale, France, and Istanbul Biennale, Turkey. His work is in private and public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris, and Deutsche Bank, and among others. In May 2018, Morales was awarded the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arlene and Morton Scult Contemporary Forum Award, which culminated in a major solo exhibition in 2019. In 2021, a solo exhibition of Morales work will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuscon, AZ.

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This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.

A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Rooted in Place: Radical South Asian Storytelling Blooms in Berkeley | Barnali Ghosh (Fall 2022 Speaker Series)

Lecture, 77 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance)

Click the title and scroll to the gray box below to access the video.

Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public Friday, October 7, 2022

Speakers: Barnali Ghosh, Artist, Community Activist, and Designer

Barnali Ghosh talks about creating the award-winning Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, part of a growing movement of activist-led, place-based storytelling. She and partner Anirvan Chatterjee have led thousands of people through walks on Berkeley streets revealing little-known histories of immigrant freedom fighters in the 1910s and queer and feminist organizers in more recent years. Ghosh also led the campaign to rename part of Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue after Kala Bagai, an early 20th-century community leader who immigrated through Angel Island. As part of her explorations of place and identity, Ghosh has expanded her art practice into photographic self-portraits that highlight the beauty of the native plants of California and the fabrics of South Asia.

Barnali Ghosh is a designer, artist, storyteller, and transportation justice advocate. She co-founded the award-winning Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour. Her work attempts to bridge homes and homelands, and create spaces for belonging. She is active in Bay Area Solidarity Summer, Walk Bike Berkeley, the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, and the Berkeley Reimagining Public Safety Task Force. She has a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley. You can see her work on instagram @berkeleywali and @berkeleysouthasian or at www.barnalighosh.art.

UC @Berkeley Arts + Design Fridays: Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration, and Resistance is a lively series of talks by artists, performers, scholars, and activists exploring themes of global and US migration, exclusion, and belonging. It is also a UC Berkeley course offered as Humanities 20: Explorations of Art + Design. Organized by Susan Moffat, Creative Director of Future Histories Lab and Executive Director of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative and by Lisa Wymore, Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and Faculty Advisor of Berkeley Arts + Design. Hosted by Susan Moffat.

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This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.

A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Border-thinking Through Wartime Incarcerations Environments | Lynne Horiuchi (Fall 2022 Speaker Series)

Lecture, 87 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance)

Click the title and scroll to the gray box below to access the video.

Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public Friday, September 30, 2022

Speakers:

Anoma Peris and Lynne Horiuchi

Description: Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi will talk about their new book, The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps and the Pacific War. The design and location of prisoner of war camps in Singapore and Australia and of concentration camps for Japanese American civilians in the U.S. such as the one at Manzanar tested cultural boundaries and prompted resistance by incarcerated soldiers and civilians alike.

Lynne Horiuchi is an architectural historian whose work is cross-disciplinary, examining concepts of imprisonment, race, space, mobility, everyday racism, and civil justice.

Anoma Pieris is a professor of Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design.

UC @Berkeley Arts + Design Fridays: Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration, and Resistance is a lively series of talks by artists, performers, scholars, and activists exploring themes of global and US migration, exclusion, and belonging. It is also a UC Berkeley course offered as Humanities 20: Explorations of Art + Design. Organized by Susan Moffat, Creative Director of Future Histories Lab and Executive Director of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative and by Lisa Wymore, Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and Faculty Advisor of Berkeley Arts + Design. Hosted by Susan Moffat.

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This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.

A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Angel Island and Alcatraz: Site-inspired Dance, Theater, and Landscapes of Incarceration | Lenora Lee and Ava Roy (Fall 2022 Speaker Series) 

Lecture, 84 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance

Click the title and scroll to the gray box below to access the video.

Friday, September 9, 2022 Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public

Speakers:

Lenora Lee, Artistic Director, Lenora Lee Dance

Ava Roy, Artistic Director, We Players

Co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

Description: Choreographer Lenora Lee and theater director Ava Roy will discuss San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island and Alcatraz Island as creative catalysts and settings for their site-inspired performances addressing migration, incarceration, and resistance.

Lee’s dance performance Within These Walls was inspired by the experiences of people incarcerated at the Angel Island Immigration Station and premiered inside the detention barracks there on the 135th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act. It will be performed by UC Berkeley students at Zellerbach Playhouse in February 2023, in a restaging directed by Sansan Kwan. Lee’s latest research-based dance work, In the Movement (at ODC Sept. 1-11), focuses on family separations and the mass detention of immigrants. It was conceived to be performed at Alcatraz, and incorporates footage shot in the island prison.

Roy used the entirety of Angel Island as a stage for a peripatetic production of Homer’s Odyssey that led the audience on a journey over hills, beaches and ruins, exploring notions of exile, home, and the wages of war. On Alcatraz, she examined notions of human freedom, justice and redemption in a three-year residency with the National Park Service on Alcatraz. In addition to directing a production of Hamlet on Alcatraz, Roy collaborated with youth at the San Francisco Juvenile Justice Center and artists incarcerated at San Quentin. She brought together artists and the public in a 4-day Alcatraz Symposium on Freedom and Justice that included performance art, music, dance, visual art exhibitions, ritual, and panel discussions with formerly incarcerated artists as well as victim awareness activists.

UC Berkeley Arts + Design Fridays: Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration, and Resistance is a lively series of talks by artists, performers, scholars, and activists exploring themes of global and US migration, exclusion, and belonging. It is also a UC Berkeley course offered as Humanities 20: Explorations of Art + Design. Organized by Susan Moffat, Creative Director of Future Histories Lab and Executive Director of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative and by Lisa Wymore, Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and Faculty Advisor of Berkeley Arts + Design. Hosted by Susan Moffat.

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This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.

A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Part of the Fall 2021 Colloquium (Place-Based Storytelling Techniques and Technologies)

Michael Epstein a screenwriter, journalist and pioneer in interactive documentaries.  He has a Master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT where he focused on location-based storytelling applications.  Through his studio, Walking Cinema, Michael has produced numerous immersive storytelling apps for broadcast clients including MTV, PBS, Audible, and Detour.  His 2009 production for PBS was the first app to win an award in a film festival and was declared Best of Boston by the Boston Globe.  His interactive production on marine climate change, “Blue Impact,” for the New England Aquarium won the American Association of Museum’s Silver Muse Award.  He was also awarded the Gold Muse award for his early Augmented Reality maritime history project “Posts from Gloucester” and his featured project “Museum of the Hidden City” won the 2020 Gold Muse award.     

Michael’s documentary career started as a freelance reporter for NPR’s “Morning Edition” and expanded to longform journalism, creating several original audio series for Audible on topics ranging from the geography of literature to the tension between art and technology in Silicon Valley.  In 2021, Walking Cinema completed its first walking + driving experience:  Free & Equal about an early experiment in African American freedom in Sea Islands, South Carolina.  He and his team are currently in development on another story about housing history for the Smithsonian and an immersive podcast about religious sites in Boston. 

Tianna is a Black, queer, genderfluid poet, performance and teaching artist. As a slam poet, they placed 5th at the National Poetry Slam 2017 and 7th in the world at the Women of The World Poetry Slam. 

They have earned fellowships at The Watering Hole, Griot’s Well and Tin House. Tianna is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and finalist for the Miss Sarah Fellowship. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Shade Literary Arts, Stellium Lit Magazine, Ink Well, December Magazine, Quiet Lightning and elsewhere. 

Tianna has a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from California Institute of Integral Studies. As a teaching artist she has worked with organizations such as Youth Speaks, Upward Bound, Bay Area Creative and more.

Website: www.walkingcinema.org

Part of the Fall 2021 Colloquium (Place-Based Storytelling Techniques and Technologies)

Commons Archive: Developing a Neighborhood Literacy

“Commons Archive is a historical preservation program that re-thinks the archive as a place of privilege and de-colonizes our thinking about what’s worth preserving.”

–Susan D. Anderson History Curator & Program Manager,‎California African American Museum

Oakland-based cultural researcher Sue Mark will unpack strategies and questions surrounding Commons Archive, a creative grassroots history project she launched in 2015. Centered at North Oakland’s Golden Gate Library, Commons Archive has been providing platforms for longtime and new neighbors to narrate, describe and share their many histories. In 2010, Black neighbors were just under half of North Oakland’s population; eight years later, only a quarter of residents were Black. Today, the numbers are even lower. Commons Archive’s interactive format preserves neighbor knowledge that, if undocumented, will disappear.

In collaboration with North Oakland, CA groups and organizations Commons Archives connects neighbors through stories, shared resources and celebrations. Commons Archive invites neighbors from all walks of life to express, sing, dance, read and listen to the multilayered stories that continue to shape these neighborhoods. By embracing traditional block club hospitality, Commons Archive supports community resiliency.

Part of the Fall 2021 Colloquium (Place-Based Storytelling Techniques and Technologies)

Seth Eisen is a San Francisco-based artist creating a hybrid of live performance and visual media. He engages LGBTQ history as a living, breathing dialogue by researching lost legacies and reflecting his findings on stage. Central to his artistic vision is the combining of puppetry and object manipulation with visual art, writing and dance in a layered and unified aesthetic. He devises work through rigorous historical research and creative interviews revealing subversive histories. Eisen’s work expands the dialogue between static and live art as a vehicle to broaden human perspectives and effect social change while honoring queer ancestors and evolving queer culture.

Part of the Fall 2021 Colloquium (Place-Based Storytelling Techniques and Technologies)

Thurgood Marshall Regional Park – Home of the Port Chicago 50: Converting a Former Military Base into Public Parkland and Celebrating African-American History