MAKE AMERICA: A Workshop with Bz Zhang

Join us for a workshop with artist Bz Zhang focusing on their art installation, MAKE AMERICA. Participants will interact with and contribute to the installation.

MAKE AMERICA wonders aloud about the ethics of memory through the (dis)assembly of our nation’s physical and cultural constructions. Visitors are invited to participate in the assembling and reassembling of visual and spatial elements that hold cultural resonance in the United States across time and space. These building blocks — architectural, infrastructural, monumental, and informal — work together to normalize and reproduce existing systems of power through their symbolism, function, scale, and ubiquity. In dislocating them from their usual placements and into dialogue with each other and us, however, we might better understand their physical and cultural construction as entangled processes. At stake is our ability to construct meaning and memory together toward the futures that we deserve.

In a workshop with the artist, participants will use the building blocks of MAKE AMERICA as a prompt to collectively look for the cultural construction of memory at various scales (e.g. on campus at Duke; in the Triangle; in the nation); to uncover how existing systems of power are expressed through both physical and cultural construction, and — by literally drawing on the art installation — to draw forth possible liberatory futures beyond. To that end, participants are asked to bring pencils, pens, markers, stickers, and other visual tools. Materials will also be provided.

Zhang will also speak at a public event on March 28 with David Treuer and Ryan Falcioni, The Ethics of Memory.

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