You can trust yourself
Tabling, artist games, and opportunities galore
I originally wanted to send this substack prior to my vending at San Francisco Zine Fest this past Sunday, 9/1. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish editing it on my phone and already left my iPad at home. Fog. But that’s okay, less pressure to send off and I can do it more thoroughly. Above are all the zines I sold at my table 95, Bicoastal Press with my friend Vicky, and you can see excerpts from each on my website.
San Francisco was utterly amazing. My first trip by myself that wasn’t work or family related. The last time I was in California was in 2007 during my first psychotic break where I had deep paranoia, delusions, and hallucinations. It hurt so much, I remember asking a tita I never met before “how do you talk to people?” I just wanna hug my younger self, my little one, and reassure her that she’ll find stability and real joy—in her life and with herself.
It felt so good to see Vicky and Rhea after three years separation. Tabling was a blast but I definitely said “Feel free to look around” ad nauseum haha. It was really wonderful to see people wanting to trade and buy my works. So invigorating and made me want to table again and make new zines hehe. I loved visiting Silver Sprocket, bucket list along with City Lights, which held the after party. I was too shy and just focused on browsing and buying, enough to earn a really cool steampunk pink goat tote bag hehe. Next time I’m gonna speak up, I hope haha.
I trusted myself more during this trip. Trust that I can navigate a city I only been to once, on my own. Trust I can keep safe the spare key of my friend. Trust that I can fly and do airports well. Ugh before my flight, my dad was yelling at me for my rolling luggage that I can’t bring it ‘cuz it was too big. I told him it was carry-on and free which I already made sure of. So aggravating. It ended up did counting and I never had to pay for check-in. In fact, due to a full flight, I got to check in my carry-on for FREE on BOTH flights. So I never had to lift the heavy luggage into the overhead bin! I love it when I prove myself right over others, especially if they pissed me off hehe.
Nowadays I’m growing confident and stand up for myself more. Talking my perfectionist self down and accept current progress and growth. Like usually I’d want to make three JSTOR recommendations. This time it’s a book and an article. But that’s enough really. I wanna get this newsletter out so folks can act on these opportunities immediately and this is already pretty long hehe.
I love the life I lead now. I adore the person I’m becoming and who I am exactly now. There’s so much to be proud of and I’m excited for the coming months. Not because I have a lot planned already, but because I know I’ll make it super special hehe. I hope you’ll enjoy your weekend ahead and you go for your whole heart every time.
Telephone Art Game - Sign Up to Participate
I signed up to be an artist on Telephone and I can’t wait for my assignment. “Playing TELEPHONE is simple. We will review your application and, if accepted, you will receive a confirmation email. Then, we ask that you keep your eyes peeled for an assignment. Depending on how our game unfolds, this assignment may come quickly or may take time.
In this email, you will be assigned an anonymous work of art from somewhere else on earth and it will be your job to translate this artwork into your own medium. This work of art may not immediately speak to you or reveal its meaning, but trust that it contains a message. Once you've completed your translation, you will return your work to us, and it will be passed to another artist somewhere on our big, beautiful globe to translate in turn.”
You can register here and learn more. Here’s the previous iteration’s website where you can explore over 900 artworks.
My project Substrates on the new Leaflet app
I’m part of the alpha testing team for a new app, Leaflet. “It’s a super easy and fun way to make, share, and collaborate on little pieces of paper”. It’s created by Hyperlink Academy, “a place for ambitious creative projects with friends, partners, and co-conspirators. Use it as a shared notebook, a place for conversation, and a tool for coordination. Hyperlink is for creating, collecting, and sharing the work and artifacts of a collective.” You can find more information about Leaflet and the group and sign up to try it out here.
For my project, Substrates, I document all the toys, books, random objects, all the etc. I wanna use for my storytelling. I take photos, provide image descriptions, as well as background like where I got it, and list any ideas I have for them. My goal is to keep returning to this repository and update it with WIPs, hopefully finished projects, further ideas, and more items to carry out my will hehe. You can subscribe for future updates too. Check the whole thing out here.
By 9/15, submit a Leaflet for a chance to win $100
If you make a cool Leaflet document, you can submit it for a grant of $100! They’re choosing 10 lucky winners and you can find more details here. To explore examples, check out this library.
Weird Side Projects Online Shop Open til 9/30
One of my favorite artists & teachers, April Soetarman, is opening her webshop for the entire month of September. She sells really wonderful signs and postcards. She’s “been anonymously installing these custom street signs with positive or unexpected messages in cities across the country since 2016. After a successful Kickstarter in 2018, I've been getting a lot of requests for more signs! I did another run back in 2020. The signs are currently retailing in art and museum stores, but now I'm doing a limited third-run.” Her work and vision inspires me so very much.
9/21 - Zine Swap at the NY Anarchist Book Fair
2x2periodical and chaos star are hosting a zine swap at the New York Anarchist Book Fair on September 21st from 11am - 7pm. 2x2 is “a submission-based publication that is distributed for free at book stores, coffee shops, record stores, restaurants, by hand-to-hand exchange, and wherever else we think to leave some copies.” I’d love to join. their zine swap one day. You can learn more about the Anarchist Book Fair here.
9/22 - MAARTE Screening at Culture LAB LIC, New York
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be vending my zines at the next MAARTE series screening at the CultureLab LIC on 9/22! MAARTE, helmed by the talented and versatile Roxanne Lim, and “a docuseries following a dynamic group of femme-identifying Filipinx individuals who are trailblazers in art, activism, and social empowerment. "MAARTE" is a movement to paint a richer, more inclusive portrait of Pinay experiences that transcends the boundaries of traditional narratives.” You can RSVP by donating and placing a note “9/22 RSVP”. More details about the event found here. My goal is to read and bring Filipinx/WOC/LGBTQIA POC zines & books to give away with purchase, at least 15 hehe. MAARTE is offering free tabling spots for their nationwide screenings! Check out their post for more info and go for it!
9/14-15 - Trade Books for Pickles at C. C. Filson in NYC
Sweet Pickle Books, a wonderful lower east side used bookshop, will be at C. C. Filson which is an outdoors clothing and gear store. They’re offering a great outdoors array of books and you can trade books for a jar of delicious pickles! Here’s the current list of what they’ll exchange for. Have fun!
Due 9/27 - B-Roll Zine Bazaar in Jersey City, NJ
Applications are now open for the B-Roll Zine Bazaar! They will center photo zines, perzines, and film / video related zines. Accepted vendors will be notified by October 3rd. There is no table fee. BRZB will take place in a large cinema room at Mana Contemporary with a 6-hour long screening of silent diary films happening simultaneously. Go for it. I will! It actually makes me want to make a new zine of each category hehe. A physical edition of Substrates with a lyric essay of why I hoard. Video poem with San Francisco footage from the view of an airplane and all the possible people below. Use the instax film & fujifilm camera my friend Stephanie gifted me in a theme or a story. There’s a lot of possibilities and I hope to get at least one printed so I can submit the images in the form. I think I’ll strive to make the three but only order one copy of each. Then if accepted, I’ll make an edition for all. It would be cool to make a new zine for MAARTE watch party though.
JSTOR Recommendations
Did you know that you can sign up for a FREE account on JSTOR and get up to 100 free article views per month? Plus a shitload of open access books and journals. Enjoy!
No Archive Will Restore You by Julietta Singh
There are at least two ways to understand the emergence of a desire: one is through a moment, when something shifts and the way you act and react, the way you turn things over, is fundamentally altered. The other is through accrual, how over time and repetition our histories draw us toward certain practices and ways of feeling and wanting. My desire is the idea of the archive. Or, more accurately, it is the idea of what the archive might have to offer. While I know that my desire for the archive is in reality a long accrual, I imagine it as this single solitary moment.
I loved reading Julietta Singh’s book No Archive Will Restore You which you can read in full for free here. Such elegant and utterly vulnerable writing about being a brown queer mom and academic. Here’s a description:
“At once memoir, theory, poetic prose, and fragment, No Archive Will Restore You is a feverish meditation on the body. Departing from Antonio Gramsci’s summons to compile an inventory of the historical traces left in each of us, Singh engages with both the impossibility and urgent necessity of crafting an archive of the body. Through reveries on the enduring legacies of pain, desire, sexuality, race, and identity, she asks us to sense and feel what we have been trained to disavow, to re-member the body as more than itself. Why this desire for a body archive, for an assembly of history’s traces deposited in me? (I worry over how to describe it, how to frame it without sounding banal or bafflingly idiosyncratic.) The body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosures of reason. It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter, of turning toward rather than against oneself. And vitally, it is a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies. I begin then to compile an archive of my body, an activity that from the start feels discomfortingly intimate. Too intimate and too bewildering an undertaking, because like all other bodies mine has become so many things over time, has changed dramatically through forces both natural and social. I am also, it must be noted, a person whose body has been broken and maimed many times over—a fact that I cannot yet entirely account for.”
The Breakup Museum: Archiving the Way We Were by Leslie Jamison
Exhibit 1: Clamshell Necklace
Florence, Italy
It’s a simple necklace: a tiny, brown-striped clam-shell tied to a black leather cord. The shell was gathered from a beach in Italy, and attached to the cord by means of two holes drilled into the shell with a dental drill. The person who made the necklace for me was a dental student in Florence at the time. He did it secretly, in one of his classes, while he was supposed to be learning how to make crowns. wore that necklace every single day, until I didn’t anymore.
The Museum of Broken Relationships is a collection of ordinary objects hung on walls, tucked under glass, backlit on pedestals: a toaster, a child’s pedal car, a modem handmade in 1988. A wooden toilet paper dispenser. A positive pregnancy stick. A positive drug test. An axe. They come from Taipei, from Slovenia, from Colorado, from Manila, all donated by strangers, each accompanied by a story: In the 14 days of her holiday, every day I axed one piece of her furniture.
Published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, one of my favorite essayists writes about my dream destination, The Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia. Interlaced with wonderful drawings, background, and a walkthrough, she includes writeups of what she would exhibit. It’s a gorgeous lyric essay and it makes me want to visit even more.
So cool seeing your life and work now! Keep up the zines and the creative lifestyle! I’ve taken a little break but am glad to be back and read your work