How We Gather When the World Burns: Devising Solidarity Across the Global South

What does it mean to create in times of destruction and bloodshed? How might everyday acts of care, for oneself and for one’s community, become seeds for collective creation? And how can performance sharings cultivate resistance and solidarities in the present moment? This project builds on long-standing relationships with artists and activists from India and Iran, alongside ongoing efforts to cultivate community among immigrants and allies in the Twin Cities. Through a series of collaborative workshops, we engage deeply with everyday embodied knowledge, as sites of reflection and resistance. In the context of violent regimes and normalized forms of everyday violence, these practices become spaces to gather, witness, and reimagine collective life.

Drawing from these workshops, we will devise a performance that foregrounds co-created knowledge through non-dominant methodologies. The devising process, rooted in sustained dialogue and embodied experimentation, will not merely comment on contemporary debates around immigration, solidarity, and authoritarianism; it will actively intervene in them. By amplifying immigrants’ and People of Color’s lived experiences and strategies of survival, the work generates new political and aesthetic imaginaries. Care among immigrants from the Global South is complex and often shaped by shifting notions of home, belonging, and identity. We attend to these tensions rather than smoothing them over, asking: how do we care for one another when geopolitics positions us against each other? Centering performance-making as inquiry, this project expands knowledge production beyond academic walls, creating a collective space to navigate grief, displacement, and resistance together.