Origin Stories
Origin Stories is a community-based artistic project exploring concepts of identity, isolation, assimilation, difference, and family. This project documents a multi-year process conducted with marginalized communities in Southern California and Iowa. Originally designed to empower adopted and fostered people to record their unique histories, this 2-hour workshop invites participants to work in groups to create a story using visual prompts. The stories are shared with the entire cohort of participants. Then individually each participant creates at least one card (by drawing, tracing, collage ...) that visually illustrates something from the collective story, i.e. a character, the plot, the resolution, a problem along the way. While at first the workshops were presented only to adopted and fostered people, the workshops were expanded to artists, particularly female-identifying artists and artists who feel marginalized, and the general public. Additionally, for other workshops in Los Angeles, I invited co-facilitators who were not adoptees but told their “origin stories” as they related to social belonging that may intersect with their social positions in the society (immigrant identity, queer, ethnic minority, etc). The cards created in the workshop reflect not only remembered and imagined pasts, but also stories that have been passed down in their birth, adopted, or chosen families; stories that have been whispered from one woman to another; and imagined futures. Each card becomes part of another deck that is printed and used in future workshops.
Origin Stories, Bitter Party, Jerri Allyn, Santana Dempsey, Nateene Diu, Chelo Montoya, Jeanette Yoffe, MA, MFT, adoption, adoptee, Nicole Rademacher, Veridian Community Engagement Fellowship Award, Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Artistic Community Engagement Grant Los Angeles.
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Origin Stories
Origin Stories is a participatory project examining how stories of self are constructed, repeated, and altered. It began with a series of voice memos in which I repeatedly reconstructed an invented story about a girl who had been sent away from her family without knowing she had been sent away. I never listened back to earlier recordings; each telling began again from what I remembered.
The project was first tested in 2016 through art therapy groups with adopted, foster, and foster-to-adopt tweens and teens, with Jeannette Yoffe, LMFT, providing the clinical and ethical container. It later expanded through workshops, exhibitions, and public programs.
In the public iterations, a presentation by me or an invited collaborator sharing an origin story served as the point of departure. Participants then worked in groups with decks made from cards accumulated during previous sessions. Using at least three cards, each group constructed a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and some form of conflict, then shared it with everyone present.
Participants were then asked to make at least one new card. Some worked individually and others together. The cards entered the growing collection and became material for subsequent workshops, while also becoming part of the exhibition. Participants who wanted to keep their original cards could have them scanned on site.
Each iteration therefore changed the material available to the next: stories generated cards, cards generated new stories, and no single account became authoritative.
Collaborators: Bitter Party, Jerri Allyn, Santana Dempsey, Nateene Diu, Chelo Montoya, and Jeanette Yoffe, LMFT.
*This project was partially funded by the Veridian Community Engagement Fellowship Award and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Artistic Community Engagement Grant Los Angeles.
