How does the diasporic body transmit, sense, and cache memories of community? Explore this inquiry together with an intimate group of POC at Embodying Community, a peer-learning gathering hosted by artist Alice Yuan Zhang at Oyoun. We will start by reading the Afro-German poet and activist May Ayim’s poem “Community”, which is the focal point for Rongin Shagor’s call for artists’ responses. Referencing ancestral technologies, the artist invites her acupuncturist Y Thuan La to virtually facilitate an embodied grounding exercise and answer questions related to traditional Eastern healing methods. From there, we will share mugwort tea and snacks while mapping how our bodies may act as routers for community in both subjective and shared ways. 

Embodying Community is part of Alice’s open reflection process in response to Oyoun’s project Rongin Shagor, which invites an assemblage of voices on cultural memory in context of coloniality, displacement, and resistance in Berlin and beyond. Drawing from her Buddhist upbringing, Alice considers the body as a site for re-membering vital connections to place, people, and ecology. Her forthcoming work, titled Anatomy of an Intergenerational Router, will be an autofictional 3D representation of her own ancestral rituals and relations.