STRANGE/R/NESS: Who Am I Without The Things That Are Familiar To Me?

Event details

This event is part of a series hosted by the Postdigital Intimacies research cluster at Coventry University's Centre for Postdigital Cultures, offering a week-long online exploration of the uncanny, strange, and 'other' aspects of today's digital and postdigital intimacies.

Other events include: 

• Digital intimacies and the Queer Geographies of Encounter
• Under Cover of Niceness: Deepening White Supremacy through Wellness, Crypto & Hyper Segregation
• Vanishing Act - An Ethnography of Digitalization and the Disappearance of Printed News

Biography

Zea Asis, artist and author of “Strange Intimacies”

Abstract

In this talk, Asis reflects on her own process writing the zine Strange Intimacies during the pandemic, which she collaborated on with two other artists. As Asis’ first book of essays, Strange Intimacies is about a young woman's coming-of-age in the Philippines as bound to the necessity of movement, physical, emotional and intellectual, which becomes the impetus for the constant discovery of selves, past and present. Subtitled “Essays on dressing up and consumption,” Asis writes “this is what it means to be ontologically insecure: To live life as if already dead, or in the cusp of it. It is a time we’re forced to evaluate, ‘Who am I without the things that are familiar to me?’ and grapple with the unsteadiness that comes from the drudging perpetual reconciliation of things that once were and how they ought to be now.” Through acts of consumption and romantic interludes, across thrift spaces, office spaces, and streets, Asis captures a womanhood that refuses romanticism, and instead revels in the interweaving of grit and grace necessary for contemporary survival.

Asis will speak also to her own experience we as a zine maker in the Philippines, thinking through the 'strange' as it applies to how writers and publishers have created their own paths, outside of mainstream avenues of publishing, to reach their audience and create a circular community of readers, artists, and writers.

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