She Who Has No Master(s) on the Collaborative Process

What birthed this collaboration?

This collaboration was borne out of an invitation from the George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Gallery in Salt Lake City to feature our work. After understanding the gallery space (two of its four walls were floor to ceiling windows), and the flexibility of setting up floating walls inside the gallery, SWHNM(s) met to discuss engaging with windows, specifically, to use familial photographs as an entrance point or portal into time, family history. 

We also wanted to enact a type of “collective voicing” that, while rooting itself in historic and cultural circumstances we have in common as women and nonbinary persons of Vietnamese diaspora, would also illustrate the individuality of experiences that exist within plurality. Each of us has family and personal, bodily histories that have felt the reverberations from war, displacement, refugee experience, intergenerational trauma. Our larger work as a collective was birthed as an act of reaching out of the isolation of such experiences, to bring our individual voices and consciousnesses together into a shared and nurturing space. For us, this collaborative process is impactful for what occurs both on and off the page in the process of writing together.

Could you describe the process? How was it made?

Initially, we each identified a family photograph that was emotionally charged for each of us. Over several Zoom meetings, we: wrote individually in response to the figures in the photograph guided by a theme centering around “hunger” (which was open to each writer’s interpretation, whether they wrote about hunger in physical, emotional, spiritual, or other terms); gathered together as we cut certain parts or whole bodies out of the photographs in an act of liberation and safekeeping; and finally, the generated texts were then “poured” into the molds of the people in the photograph—as if using stencils. 

What did you learn from this collaboration?

That words, texts, the verbal realm could replace or supplant figures from the archives, especially visual bodies in family photographs. That it would not be an erasure of these bodies, persons, and lives, but a way of manifesting what these images communicate and elicit from each of us.

Also, how the act of “pouring” words into these text-shapes can inspire a more “embodied” kind of reading and composing. The text-shapes affect how the words ride and land on our breaths, and our reading becomes guided by the rhythm of these body-shapes.

Like every collaboration with our collective, we learned from sharing and assembling our contributions. Every member interpreted the prompt differently, which further illustrated the diversity of our strengths and experiences. The process seeded new ideas for further projects together.