A collaborative workshop between imagery & text
Every few months, long-time friend & favorite collaborator Joseph Rajani (aka Jalma and one half of Oji) and I half-jokingly conjure up a project over text, every few years we see it through.
In 2017, Joe produced Resurrect: A project that evolved over months through dialogue between us as friends & confidants & mirrors about gender, identity, abuse, misperception, gaze, ancestry and the role of conversation between “opposites”
In 2024, we started talking making artifacts together. This year we shipped 2 sets of zines to festivals & to friends.
Over the years, our lives continued to intersect in more ways than one, and I had the joy of getting to know Jinal (the other half of Oji). Joe & Jinal’s wedding was the first social event I went to during covid, Oji creations have been my favorite gifts for friend’s weddings & office mementos, they are often the first friends I see when I visit Chennai, Jinal & I currently work at the same company and get to chat on Microsoft Teams with more warmth than colleagues should share and talking to Joe remains a life-source of creativity in my life, wherever I am.
Snapshots of togetherness from the last few years
The 3 of us are wildly different people, with an overlapping need to create, to hold space for others, to learn & to embrace the weird & unfamiliar through it all.
Today, we got to do all of that combined in the first iteration of Word as Artwork as part of the Chicago Poetry Center Bigger Table Workshop-Fundraiser series, for 10 wonderful participants.
Our themes for today were Here, Not Here & Everywhere.
Joe and Jinal are self taught artists, and as you can see below, I evidently have already peaked in my artist journey 🌝 We shared this, and I share this here to say that the goal of this workshop was not to create a masterpiece, but to shift our observation outward, reflections inward & create something in the process.
Here is a guided version of our workshop.
Note: For each prompt, you may choose to start afresh, continue as frames/a zine or rewrite/draw over it each time so each time you end up with an altered version of what you started with. As we reminded everyone in the workshop, as long as your pen is moving and you’re feeling playful, you’re doing the assignment right.
Warm-up: Visualize a letter from your name, reimagine it as something else.
We saw a hand holding a cupcake in a lower-case j, a sea monster in a capital J, a wave in a side-ways S, a harp in a D… What do you see in the letters of your name?
One little J sea monster
small j as a nose
Part 1: Here.
List 3-5 words you associate with Here.
Read Here and Now by Sarah Kay, in conjunction with this visual by Oji
Prompt: Here/1 Word
- Draw 1 shape / set your boundary space through a shape (ex. circle, square)
- From the spark text, visual & your own words, pick one that sticks with you
- Visualize it in a way that connects to your here now, make it as concrete an image as possible, this could be:
Something that is present for you, with you right now
Something that is visible in your current view
Something that is tangible, can be held in your hand in this present moment
Something that is in your immediate surrounding
Something that feels close enough to breath in
Jinal’s illu from today
Part 2: Not Here.
List 3-5 phrases you associate with Not Here.
Does it remind of what’s not here anymore or what doesn’t exist yet?
Today, is it something that exists but is not in your current physical space?
Could be something that is here that shouldn’t be? What feels out of place?
Or is it something that is not with/within you now?
Read Imagine a wide field, by Kathleen McGookey & reflect on the visual by Oji
Prompt: Not Here/1 Phrase
- Draw an open form (ex. dotted lines, arc/semi-circle..)
- From the spark & your own reflections pick one phrase that sticks with you (modify it, make it yours)
- Visualize it in a way that connects what’s not here to your here, bring it into the present with a color, a visual signal, something with something that means something to you
Joe’s illu from today
Part 3: Everywhere.
Fill in the blanks:
Whenever I am, I always feel .
is a totem I carry wherever I go.
is a ritual/habit I follow wherever I am.
is an aspect of nature I seek wherever I am.
When I look at the sky, I think _.
Read Once and Future by Desdamona and take notice of Oji’s visual in parallel
“I began writing ‘Once and Future’ in 2015, thinking about what comes from the ashes when something is destroyed. If the world as we know it was obliterated but we survived, what would we do? What would we rebuild? What would we leave behind? There would be a new chance to do something differently than we have done in the past, and this poem was the beginning of my ideas around what that could look like.” —Desdamona, poets.org - Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 8, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
Prompt: Everywhere/Boundaryless
Choose any medium (illustration, photography, memo, poem, collage) and draft a message to yourself:
a voicemail for a day when you’re alone, a letter for a past self to know the now-you, a visual totem to put in your wallet, draw a reminder/memory you don’t want to forget.
My illu and text from today
Acknowledgements:
To Joe and Jinu, thank you for being the gentlest collaborators.
Thank you the wonderful humans who showed up today and made the space the warm, gooey, generous, sillyness-filled container that it was.
This workshop was a part of an event-based fundraiser series for the Chicago Poetry Center to help fund poetry residencies for Chicago public school students.
We promise to come back with more real soon and meanwhile hope to see some of your Here, Not Here, Everywhere weird & wonderful word as artwork <3
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