Grief-Work: Diasporic Storytelling and Place-making, is a collaborative, critical and creative meditation on the material, historical, and cultural landscapes that underpin indigeneity in relation to transnational migration and diaspora when these landscapes are shattered by intolerable social, climatic, or political conditions. It considers ways in which displaced people may dynamically re-inhabit these landscapes by pouring over the record of the conventions and legends to which they are dedicated and which they creatively adapt to unsettled, marginalized conditions. Neither a nostalgic return to lost forms, nor absorption in or recuperation of insuperable loss, the project lies somewhere between the preservation of lost forms and the creative intervention of new ones. The project aims to set into relief some of the imperatives of and directives for thinking about disrupted cultural and personal ecosystems through the lens of heirloom artifacts conveyed across great diasporic distances and handed down within my family and currently in my possession: some three hundred documents, correspondences, and receipts relating to and dating from and prior to my family's flight from Urmia, Persia in the late nineteen-teens during the Assyrian genocide, Seyfo. Motivating this work is a fresh consideration of my international upbringing in Pakistan, Turkey, and Afghanistan and my Near Eastern heritage as an Assyrian-American. The reality of each has occasioned a complex and nuanced experience of the other. Collaborators include Monika Neuland (poet) and David Downing (cellist) and Darci Gamerl (oboist) of Bel Canto Duo.

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