The Subconscious as Muse: A Workshop with Swati Sudarsan

This workshop focuses on the generative potential of our subconscious creativities. Over a two-hour session, we will first learn about the Jungian concepts of collective unconscious, synchronicity, and universal archetypes. We will use three different artist’s interpretations of tarot decks as prompts for a journaling exercise that will help us come up with characters, and then a narrative for them. Then, we will make word braids, using strips of paper made of cut up interviews and poems by artists we admire. We will use these braids to create word banks, and then draw on AAWW archival materials including poems, testimonies, and documents that trace the history of Asian American migration and belonging to inspire political poems that speak to immigration law, resistance, and the long fight for dignity and rights.