04. July 2026
Onde Eu Coloco O Meu Corpo Agora? (Where do I place my body now?)
Affective mapping workshop

As part of “Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin – Migration, Memory, and Social Change (1950–present)” at Mental Health Art Space Berlin, curated by Kathy-Ann Tan

How do we mourn what we cannot remember?

This question has been echoing through the silence that permeates Ryukyuan/Okinawan memory. Memory that was not passed from one generation to another — from grandmother to mother, from mother to daughter. To remember the humiliation, the pain, the violence of Japanese colonialism. To accept that we are now part of it. The difficulties of migrating to the West. The erasure of our history, of the crimes committed against us. The othering through “assimilation.”

These are not only Okinawan wounds. They belong to many peoples touched by the same colonial forces, the same imperialist erasures.

In this session, Thais will screen her short experimental film “O Silêncio é Muito Eloquente” (Silence Is Very Eloquent) (2025) and share excerpts from her work-in-progress experimental documentary “Onde Eu Coloco O Meu Corpo Agora?” (Where Do I Place My Body Now?) — both circling around the grief of a place that no longer exists, and the rage of seeing one’s homeland occupied.

After the screening, there will be space for your feedback on the film. Then, we will move into a collective exercise — a kind of affective mapping — to explore how different people who share the same colonizer (or have been shaped by the same imperial forces) experience loss, anger, and longing. You will be invited to name emotions as if they were places, to draw a temporary cartography of grief.

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06. May 2026
Visualizing Grief – A Radical Politics of Loss
Moving images workshop

As part of “X-Tutorials: Grief & Society” organized by Berlin University Alliance, Freie University, Humboldt University

In the context of contemporary neoliberal hegemony, grief is frequently atomized, pathologized, and relegated to the private sphere as a temporal hurdle to be surmounted in the service of productivity. This workshop seeks to invert this paradigm, re-evaluating grief as a radical, transformative modality rather than a singular emotional deficit. Drawing upon the theoretical framework established by Langstaff, participants will investigate loss not as a discrete biographical event, but as a prismatic refraction of intersecting historical, social, and political fissures.

Through collaborative debates on experimental cinema and shared explorations of personal objects, participants will engage in visual research to map the spectral topographies of collective memory. We will synthesize these findings into an analog, collaborative video timeline—a low-fi, counter-hegemonic cinematic intervention. This process conceptualizes grief as a persistent terrain of struggle, utilizing the moving image as a vital site for the cultivation of fugitive socialities and emergent solidarities. This workshop is open to all students interested in the convergence of affect theory, experimental media, and political praxis; no prior filmmaking experience is required.

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Summer semester 2025 & 2026
Diasporic Narratives: memory, affects and archives through film and video
Lecture series Media University Berlin

What does it mean to see from the ruins of the colonial archive? How do we write nearby the wounds of diaspora without suturing them shut?

​This lecture series charts a radical itinerary through decolonial Global South thought, where the camera, the body, and the land itself become sites of counter-ethnographic warfare.

​From the diasporic fractures of Stuart Hall to the insurgent poetics of Édouard Glissant, from bell hooks’ defiant gaze to the cinematic rebellions of Pratibha Parmar, we map how the South refuses to be a spectacle. We are staring back. 

​Drawing on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “speaking nearby,” Fatimah Tobing Rony’s “third eye,” and the insurgent cinema of Sarah Maldoror, we dissect the aesthetics of power hidden in images, texts, and sounds. This is not a class about “representation.” It is a laboratory for epistemic disobedience, where students experiment with fragmented narratives, stolen stories, and counter-archives to disrupt the coloniality of seeing.

​Through film screenings, guerrilla exercises, and radical close readings, we ask:

• What happens when we refuse to “explain” the Other?
• Can archives be weaponized against their own violence?
• Who owns the right to narrate pain?

This series is for those ready to unlearn the camera, the pen, and the authority of the frame.

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2016 – 2022
O Meu Gene Não É Solúvel (My Gene Is Not Soluble)
Visual anthropology research on the Okinawan diaspora in Brazil

“The title of this research “My gene is not soluble” is an allegory to the “Políticas de Branqueamento” (“whitewashing policies”) and the myth of “racial democracy” in postcolonial Brazilian studies. The world is often thought of as being postcolonial, forcing upon us the perception of colonialism as a chapter in history that belongs to the past. It is important to reinforce that it was not left behind, but merely transformed. Colonialism remains entrenched in all kinds of structures: in our politics, relationships, minds and even bodies influencing and guiding how we see, sense, and assimilate the world around us. Brazil in particular was a laboratory for colonial practices that made it especially susceptible, as an independent republic, to scientific racism ideas from North America and Europe that tied racial purity to national cohesion and progress.”

My intention with this research and this documentary was to work with othered narratives and practices regarding Okinawan immigration in Brazil. Through the plural perspectives of decolonial studies, my curiosity resonated in the process of conducting such research and artistic projects, seeking active listening and mutual exchange with my interlocutors. I would come to realize during the final elaboration of this work, that the conscious transformation triggered by decolonial work would be much more connected to the process, in the “how” one decides to do it, rather than in the final “product” one can aim for.

Nevertheless, the most gratifying aspect to notice at the end of this work is the dance that diverse and multiple knowledges can make when placed in spaces of equal respect, importance and contemplation. It’s about recognizing that the colonial binarity in which “one is the negation of the other” can and must be debunked without any side effects more harmful than its very existence. It is about the recognition of positions of privilege and subalternization starting from a critical dialectic about the gaze that only goza (enjoys) at the expense of the pain of the other.

Finally, in the film “Maré” as a complement to this research, the black and white of the archival material from the Battle of Okinawa together with the photographs of Naomi’s family, speak about this static and timeless place of the traumas intrinsic to the bodies of the Okinawan diaspora, which refuses to remain in the past. Throughout Lucia’s dance practices, it is possible to shake these memories by means of art, which gives movement to such static images. From the critical reflection and communal contemplation proposed by Miwa, paths to emancipation from colonial traumas are opened: “it is why every decolonizing process is a self-decolonization” (Ocaña; Lopez & Conedo, 2018, p.182).

ACADEMIC SUPERVISION
Lisa Grund & Solomon Mekonen

​REVISION
Jorge Vega

FIELDWORK FACILITATOR
Hiromi Toma