Friday 9 December, 2022: Soupspoon collective ((Pitchaya Ngamcharoen (DAI, 2018), Raffia Li (DAI, 2021), Maoyi (DAI, 2022), Miyoung Chang (DAI, 2022) and Dakota Guo (DAI, 2022)) invite you to their Open Studio at the Goethe Institute Rotterdam, as a closing gesture for their three-months collective study under the theme of "Investigating the Dialectic of Arrival''. (Re-)collecting traces from a tea session on "Spectral Asia(n)" and a karaoke night on "Romanticisation of The Mother Tongue", they put together on this occasion their ongoing research as a collective and individual work-in-progress from the five of them, weaving together their interests in the power dynamic and hierarchy of senses and languages, queer migration/ landing, the dissolvement of an “I”, the interdependence within our collective body and the thin but opaque threshold of existence between life and death, etc. On the 9th they welcome you to sniff, taste, drink, chat and celebrate together with them the end of the residency through the activations of the works. The event will start at 4pm, followed by a performance by Raffia Li around 4:30pm (after sunset).
Soupspoon Open studio
Thu 08/12/2022 to Sat 10/12/2022, 14:00 - 18:00 Fri 09/12/2022, 16:00 Open Event and Performance @Goethe Institut Rotterdam
Soupspoon
is a collective-in-the-forming, consisting of Pitchaya Ngamcharoen (TH), Raffia Li (CN), Maoyi (CN), Miyoung Chang (KR) and Dakota Guo (CN). Soupspoon is cultivating a common, Asian contextualised space for the particular, which eludes translation, as well as for an art practice of "minor gestures" and "micro politics".
Collective study: Book of Traces
from Tea-session “Soupspooning Spectral Asia(n)”
Contributors:
Soupspoon, Augustina Cai, Hong, Minsun Lee Kim, Natsumi Sakai, Tianyi Zheng, Bao Dachen, Wang Yu, Ying-Ting Shen, Wang Bo, Ying Liu, Anna Apai, Czarina Calinawagan, Baoxin Liao (DAI, 2024), Soyeon An and Belle Phromchanya(NNN)
handbound by Miyoung Chang
In a tea-session themed “Soupspooning Spectral Asia(n)”, a temporary, expanded working group engaged with textual and visual prompts selected by Soupspoon. The book in front you records a process combining note-taking, reading along, and doodling along traits of ephemeral conversations—strokes that mark the non-present interlocutor form an ambiguous testimony.
Those who sleep with ghosts at nights would know that their abodes are co-extensive with ours. A weird collective belief, that convinces the public that “Asia” begins from a geographic border, culturally, socially distant from the west, has the effect of exposing the presumption of how we understand in the name of Asianess. We remain haunted by the opaque idea of what constructs us. Haunting in particular means that something has happened or is happening—the threshold between literal and metaphorical references of ghost is yet to be dissolved.
Sound of Traces
from Tea-session “Romanticization of the Mother Tongue”
Contributors:
Soupspoon, Azul De Monte (DAI, 2021), Pelumi Adejumo (DAI, 2023) and Marika Vandekraats (DAI, 2022) mixed by Maoyi
What is the mother tongue?
Why is it the “mother” “tongue”?
When is it romantic? When is it horror?
Can we escape from the relation with our mother tongues? What if one’s first language is not a spoken form?
Did you ever let another language shift/shape your body?
Instead of a seminar, we explored these questions with karaoke Singing along, singing alone, singing...
Voices being distorted, delayed, displaced.
Would you sing together in these (in)escapable sounds/ songs?