Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR) is a Berlin-based initiative and translocal network. Its practice is dedicated to artistic and curatorial research, knowledge production, and community organizing. The group's ongoing project, "From Where I Stand(FWIS)," is a series of reading-led programs that aim to uncover multiple narratives from Asian and diasporic perspectives.
Throughout this journey, we have received generous support from Callie’s Berlin and its sister bookstore, a.p.. We are thrilled to join the NNN Fair at Framer Framed, continuing this journey with our FWIS working group members Eugene Hannah Park, Emily Shin-Jie Lee, and Jiyoung Kim, who are all based in Amsterdam.

Saturday Session(15th, July) title: Holes for Travelers

Speaker: Eugene Hannah Park

A thousand year old palm-leaf manuscript called Perfection of Wisdom in Eight-Thousand Stanzas was more than a simple manuscript. The manuscript is living proof of trade routes within Asia. Through the rich network between culture and belief, the manuscript became a communication channel from Northern India, Nepal, and Tibet to Central Asia and China through the silk route.

The Holes for Travelers appropriates the palm leaf manuscript's aesthetics, imagining a monk traveling across the desert and mountain to learn and spread knowledge. The core question of the reading group is to discuss transportation and translation of knowledge by traveling. The ancient manuscript that played as a medium of cross-cultural encounter will be the carrier of thinking practices of translation beyond the Western-centralized perspective. How can knowledge be shared across different localities and languages? Will learning as a motivation help us overcome tourism? By looking into various texts connected by a string(reading) through holes(keywords), the audience is invited to navigate multiple passageways of traveling.


Sunday Session(16th, July) title: Unfolding Everyday Practices: A collective reading on Intimacy and safe space

Speaker: Emily Shin-Jie Lee & Jiyoung Kim

This reading session, co-organized by Framer Framed researchers Jiyoung Kim, Emily Shin-Jie Lee and artists M.C. Julie Yu and Lu Lin, features stories of banal objects, everyday bodies, and routine labor. Starting from M.C. Julie Yu’s essay In a Masseur’s Mind and Lu Lin’s zine project Reading My Panties, the session aims to create a space for collective reading, sharing, and discussion around the notion of intimacy and safe space from (migrant)women’s perspectives.

M.C. Julie Yu’s ‘In a Masseur’s Mind, published by Errant Journal #3, Discomfort, tells three stories of a migrant masseur, that shift around layers of the discomfort of the profession through the lenses of race, gender, nationality, and stigmatization. Julie furthermore links these complexities to the disappointed global labor chain structure. Since the publishing of the essay, Julie has been staying with the massage work not only to pay up her study loan but also to practice rethinking and reclaiming this position that once made her feel trapped. Her collaborative work with Sol Enae Lee is associated with this rethinking journey and will participate in the Non Native Native Fair, this year.

Discussing or revealing panties is considered taboo, improper, and defiant, resulting in an unconscious sense of shame surrounding women's identities due to intimate and unspoken circumstances. Reading My Panties is a zine created through correspondence initiated by Lu Lin and responded to by anonymous individuals. Recognizing the similarities in women's experiences, she utilizes this zine as a space to open up conversations in the cross-cultural context. During her session, Lu will share the stories behind the zine creation and read excerpts from the text to provide a better understanding of the context.