Song Song (Parallel Play)

  • Others' narrative of care

    Cargiving is individual.

    Caregiving is serious. Caregiving is grim.

  • Our narrative of care

    Caregiving is collective.

    Caregiving is playful. Caregiving is fun.

Methods

Song Song (parallel play) opened as a playground in which the participants are invited to reconnect with their senses via photography. In this workshop, photography was re-introduced as a balance between its intimacy and detachment, of pre-mediation and immediacy, of fun/action and stillness/strangeness through practices (but more like play). Participants were able to take prints home.

In Vietnamese, song means "at the same time" or "parallel." It goes with what the workshop is about: creating art/working alongside someone else. In math, song song means they are always at the same time, on the same length, but never meet. A connection. This workshop brought us all the way back to when we were kids, to when we were able to play alongside someone without even knowing their name.

Participants also brought objects important to them that they wanted to photograph. We photographed important objects, each other, our environment, and our expressions of play.

Below you can find some of the objects we photographed and the stories behind them.

For as long as I could remember, words made me feel powerful. Where I couldn’t speak, I could write, and people took me seriously. I brought a notebook that my partner gifted me with my favorite line from the poem won’t you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton. I also brought several sapphic books I own. These are all authors whose writing styles I strive to imitate- Jill Gutowitz for her emphasis on pop culture in her understanding of her sapphic identity (a huge part of my coming of age as well), and both Isabel Yap and Carmen Maria Machado for their knowledges of the fantastical, horrific, and obscene, and their abilities to write it beautifully.

Important Objects

My grandmother passed away when she was very young, and she was against photography so we don’t have any photos of her. When my mother became an orphan, her siblings had to get rid of many of my grandmother’s things. When my mother came to America, the only thing she had of her mother’s was this sari. Today, it’s the only thing left of my grandmother. My mother gave me a piece of the sari, which I wear as a scarf on special occasions, and she kept the other half. Photographing this scarf feels like immortalizing my grandmother’s memory.

Play

The final part of the workshop was invitation to play. We were put into random pairs and given postcards with different words based on the environment of the photo studio we were in, as well as different actions we could take together. We were encouraged to play using these concepts, and see which practices of play we wanted to document.