Wendy's Subway / Residency / Pilipinx American Library

LIBRARY-IN-RESIDENCE: THE PILIPINX AMERICAN LIBRARY (P A L)
June-July, 2018

Wendy's Subway is pleased to announce the fifth in a series of one to two month-long residencies designed to host artists, publishers, special collections, and libraries. In May and June, 2018, Wendy's Subway will host the Pilipinx American Library (P A L).

Check back for a full schedule of upcoming programs.

About P A L

The Pilipinx American Library is a bi-coastal, mobile, non-circulating library that celebrates print histories and collects narratives by writers, poets, artists, and scholars across the diaspora. P A L centers the Pilipinx American experience through the reading and sharing of texts and other printed ephemera in public, through pop-up libraries, performances and readings. The inaugural pop-up library was presented with Other Worlds as part of the Jameco Exchange exhibition, which brought books for reading and trading in public spaces within Jamaica, Queens (2016). P A L has also presented books at Jackson Heights' Diversity Plaza and participated in the BABZ Fair (2017), hosting a tribute reading with invited poets and artists in response to the first Filipino American novel by Carlos Bulosan. Recent presentations have been hosted by Flux Factory, the Smithsonian's Asian American Literature Festival, the Wendy's Subway Reading Room at Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Nous Tous Gallery in Los Angeles' Chinatown, as part of the exhibition No Longer Negotiable. Based in Queens, NY and the SF Bay Area, P A L programs are organized by co-founders PJ Gubatina Policarpio and Emmy Catedral, in collaboration with host spaces, curators, writers, and artists. Forthcoming in 2018 is a P A L curated resource room, and a series of programs at the Asian Art Museum, as well as a reading selection in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library.
https://www.weareyourpals.net/

Image: P A L / PILIPINX AMERICAN LIBRARY, Exhibition view, Tongue Tide at Flux Factory, Queens, NY. Photo courtesy of Tongue Tide.

Karl Orozco: Come You Back to Maynila Bay
Tuesday, June 12, 7pm

Join us for the first in a series of events organized on the occasion of PAL / Pilipinx American Library's residency at Wendy's Subway in June-July 2018.

Karl Orozco will present Come You Back to Maynila Bay, a community engagement printmaking project that uses hand-carved mahjong tiles to retell family narratives of his lola’s underground gambling den in the Philippines. In a recent partnership with Think!Chinatown and Chashama, Orozco activated the space at 384 Broadway to create a public gambling hall and lead intergenerational printmaking workshops with Chinatown's youth and elders. Orozco ran printmaking workshops on Sundays throughout the month of May, where he invited audience members to play games of mahjong and create printed “bills” recording their winning hands. Orozco's mahjong set incorporates Philippine symbolism and reclaims a visual heritage lost through inter-Pacific trade, Spanish colonization and U.S. imperialism. Orozco will discuss his recent project, followed by a conversation with P A L co-founder, Emmy Catedral.

Karl Orozco is an artist and educator based in Queens, NY. Orozco is a teaching artist at the Queens Museum where he teaches sequential art, printmaking and animation. Orozco was a fellow at the 2018 Denver Independent Comics and Art Expo. In 2017, his sci-fi comic Low Tide was featured in New Frontiers, a comics anthology and exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum dedicated to the life and activism of actor George Takei. He is the upcoming 2018 National Artist-In-Residence at the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, NV where he will continue his mahjong print practice and transform the downtown Vegas gallery into a public casino.

Emmy Catedral is an artist working in performance and installation with things made with paper, including books. She also makes work as The Amateur Astronomers Society of Voorhees and The Explorers Club of Enrique de Malacca. Emmy was born in Butuan, and raised in Iloilo City and Queens, NY. She is the Coordinator of Fairs & Editions for Printed Matter, Inc.

Image: Archive of Winning Hands - 23 printed records of winning mahjong hands stamped using archival ink, with gold foil, embossing and pen. Photo credit Karl Orozco.

Anti-Imperialism, Jeepney Moon Dreams, and Tito Deadpan
Tuesday, June 19, 7pm

Join our current library-in-residence, The Pilipinx American Library, for a screening of the legendary Kidlat Tahimik’s 1977 celebrated Third Cinema masterpiece Mababangong Bangungot | Perfumed Nightmare (93 mins).

In Mababangong Bangungot, Kidlat dreams of the West from his small village in the Philippines. He dreams of space travel, as he listens to the Voice of America on an old transistor radio. We follow Kidlat on a semi-autobiographical journey filled with imaginative, playful, and sardonic meditations on culture and colonialism as he travels to Paris and then to Munich.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between artists Emmy Catedral and Jaret Vadera about the major themes in the film, its personal significance, and how the film continues to resonate.

Jaret Vadera is an transdisciplinary artist and cultural producer whose work explores the poetics of translation and the politics of vision. http://www.jaretvadera.com/

This event is free and open to the public but seating will be limited.

Rolling the Ours
Tuesday, July 10, 7pm

Please join us for the third event organized on the occasion of PAL / Pilipinx American Library's residency at Wendy's Subway, through July 2018.

am so very am and
speak so very speak
From “Lyric 12,” Have Come, Am Here by Jose Garcia Villa

R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling The R’s (Kaya Press, 1995) has made a significant impact to many readers who have sought out queer Asian-American or Filipino-American representation in literature since its publication over two decades ago. P A L co-founder and librarian PJ Gubatina Policarpio will host an informal gathering to celebrate and examine the resonance of Linmark’s novel, along with works by Jose Garcia Villa, Kay Ulanday Barrett, and Elaine Castillo among others. We invite you to join us and share your stories of reading, and contributing to the “library” of Pilipinx representation(s) of queer experience. Will you start a new book with P A L? You’re welcome to bring a line, sentences, a poem, a song, a zine, a reading recommendation, an image. These can be yours or ones you’ve encountered that are important to you, that you’d like to share. These can be ones you find sifting through our library selection at Wendy's Subway. We’ll have marking tools and paper. It will be unbound, in a box, to be on display for the duration of P A L’s residency at Wendy’s Subway and beyond, with your names to be added to a growing list of contributors, to a continuous rolling of new queer chapters after Linmark.

Free and open to the public.

Image: Detail from the 20th anniversary edition of Rolling The R’s, Kaya Press, 2016

PIKON 500: A set of "readings" and open panel with artist Miko Revereza and publisher Kristian Henson
Sunday, July 22, 5pm

Join us for a presentation of various written and cinematographic works and a participatory discussion centered around migration, identity and navigating contemporary America. This event is organized on the occasion of PAL / Pilipinx American Library residency at Wendy's Subway, through July 2018.

Miko Revereza (b. 1988 Manila, Philippines) is a filmmaker, music video director and writer based in Los Angeles. Throughout his childhood up to this day, Miko resides as an undocumented immigrant in America. His work has screened in festivals such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and True False Festival, and has worked with a spectrum of artists as diverse as Teebs, Matthewdavid and Christina Aguilera. Revereza

is currently an MFA candidate at Bard College, NY.

Kristian Henson is a New York–based designer and publisher. After receiving his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2012, he continued his research and extended his design practice by actively collaborating with artists and institutions in The Philippines. In 2013, he co-founded Hardworking Goodlooking (HWGL), a publishing imprint and studio that consolidates the experiments of The Office of Culture and Design (a social practice and research project created by HWGL co-founder and Manila-based Clara Lobregat Balaguer). HGWL is a publishing and graphic design hauz interested in decolonization of aesthetic voices, vernacular artisanry, and giving value to the invisible. Primarily, they publish cultural research and theory, printed in very, very small cottage-industry presses in the Philippines. But they also work with small and large studio clients in order to fund or generate original content for the social practice projects of The OCD. HWGL works out of Brooklyn and Parañaque City.

The Wendy’s Subway Residency Program is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).