HOME GROWN ZINE (2020)
Commissioned by Usurp Art 2020
Home Grown Zine is a Tree-based art and performance writing zine.
Emotional chunks, Crushed sounds, Famous domestic dramas, Plant-based photos/film, QTPOC rage and Shaken questions.
Comes with a free audio track (poem from the zine) when you buy it!
Experimental video of a poem from the zine on YouTube.
"HOME GROWN" was commissioned by USURP GALLERY, 2020.
For the brief, “The New Normal Memorial” see below.
New notes on the title (Jan 2022)
The title “Home Grown” is partly about reclaiming the word “home”. Being asked “where are you from” is something I experienced from a very young age. My reaction to it was always different to my parents. Immigrants from a British-colonised Hong Kong meant they were somewhat happy to be shown attention about their origins.
It’s a sensitive issue for immigrants to be compared to those “born here”. I’m not saying I have more right to be here. I am saying my experience is a particular one and some may find things in common.
For me - a British-born Chinese person, even if it’s meant with curiosity, being asked “where are you from?” feels like the person is questioning whether I have as much right to be in a space as them. Having my existence questioned in various ways has been damaging and led to a loss of confidence.
That bigots and certain government officials do not consider the UK to be home to BIPOC can be seen in the news and laws. I joined many others in the campaign against Osime Brown’s deportation. We are still campaigning against the racist Nationality and Border Bill which was obscenely brought in during the pandemic.
Home is and isn’t a place I am free to create. On one hand, the garden offers succulent delights while beyond the walls of home, grows lush greenery. But I have long outgrown this place. With the same MP in power who is racist, homophobic and cunningly cruel, even as a prolific adult artist, I am ashamed and afraid to be visible. I am trapped in the home. I cannot grow here - not in the way I wish to.
And so, the word “home” is an uncomfortable usage. Having fought so hard for the armour, I find it clunky. As the brief (below) asks, “Where is the “we” and who are our communities?” In making this zine, I find release and comfort in exploring the colours and textures of nature, and in playing with the sounds I found in my current… home.
The Brief by Usurp Gallery
“Theme: The New Normal Memorial
The expression “The New Normal” came into vogue since 9/11, supposedly to describe the new measures everybody had to adjust to because of “the terrorist threat”. We have incessantly heard it again in the UK since Covid 19 entwined with languages of war.
How do we imagine creating, making and doing beyond the going back to, or changing a life that was never normal? How can we explore and make tangible what the yonder sounds, feels, looks and smells like in the context of brutalised pasts and the global neo-colonial present?
Are we already living “the new normal” - a toxic, neoliberal pandemic that forces us cyclically to prostrate and comply, deviate from and resist? Do we need to create a new memorial for future toppling?
If the usual model is: Rescue | Relief | Recovery Where do Rights | Reparations | Revolutions sit?
What ideas, ideologies or ecologies [of commemoration and future change] might we wish to spread/share? In these current climatic, virtual and viral pandemics, how do we care for the self and/or the other when we are constantly reminded to be resilient?
Where is the “we” and who are our communities? How do we create these to have, an action of agency, justice, persistent will, power and sustainable resources? How might we be together as a community in the future?”