Raffia Li

performance, Lichaam, LHBTIQ+, installatie, Dekolonisatie, Conceptueel, Community, Artistiek onderzoek

Raffia Li (TA/they), works with poetry melting in minor edges/senses, in forms of performance, video, writing and installation. Their practice focuses on engaging with "otherwise" languages as poetic and political spaces for world building, challenging ableist and normative ways of knowing and valuing. Collaboration is central to their work, both in art-making and organizing. Their current research explores access-making as an ongoing process of rearranging relationships between bodyminds, space, and time. / They tilt in slow dialoguing. Their collaborated projects have been presented in/with Today Art Museum, Guangdong Times Museum, Wuzhen Theatre Festival, Kunstinstituut Melly, Tent Rotterdam, Gasworks, Centre Pompidou, and others.

**May you** - one on one performance, 20 min, 2025, in group show Spiral Tactics , @Some Space, Chiang Mai, Thailand /Two hands meet on red fabric—one touching/being touched, one moving/being moved. Pencils press into skin, tracing silent lines of connection/ Photo: Ming

**Audio description as poetry** - workshop and open rehearsal, 2024, self-organized wheelchair friendly residency with Yunfan Tian @Suzhou Culture And Arts Centre, Suzhou, China / Two hands meet on a table— one open like a question, fingers reaching softly into space. The other, a fist, resting against the openness— not to stop it, but to feel its edge. Sleeves in contrast: darkness folded on one side, light knit warmth supported by a grey cushion Behind them, green curtains fall— breath held between scenes.

**An angle for wheelchair** - collaborative installation withYunfan and her care taker Chen, 2024, self-organized wheelchair friendly residency with Yunfan Tian @Suzhou Culture And Arts Centre, Suzhou, China/ we made our own desk, and bed for resting using what's already in the space, tailored for our body, as part of exploring the spacial rearrangement for accessibility during the residency

**for things not here not now** - performance, 60 min, 2023 with Ekrem Koç, Yunfan Tian and Yanfei Li, in group show The Ground Up And The Washed Down, @A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam/ A touchable performance is a space providing time a timespace that is trusting/trusted a moving ritual an invocation a critic Desiring Waiting Calling together for things not here not now bring them to here and now within a breathing in a breathing out / Photo: Florian Cramer

**Remixing time through bodily poetics** - live and online performance, 60 min, 2023, with miiel ferraz, Yunfan Tian and Yanfei Li, @Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn/ A collective performance explores the relationship between body, time and accessibility. Remixing time through bodily poetics emerges from a dialogue with guest artists, collaborators, organizations and visitors about the systematic and political struggle around access making, but also its world-making poetics / Photo: Bart Treuren

**on a temporary me, languages, hover** - poetry Installation and performance, 2022, @Goethe Institute Soupspoon Open studio, Rotterdam, Netherlands. performers: a lamp, a ladder, a torch, fabrics, a A4 paper, Raffia, Miyoung ,and gradually joining poems on paper - Almost, you almost become god again - Sun shuqin, the shaman was dancing all around her, singing in smoke - To look for something like a language / The shape of the installation slowly shifts throughout the ritual-performance. The ritual-performance is dedicated to body in resistance and their possible healing. Three poems are searching for their different relationality through movements of the performing artist, light, shadows, carrying the stories of three women lost their names in the "investigation" of their human-trafficking case, Grandma Qin, and the moment of almost becoming tree/god again.

**penumbra, shadow of shadow asks** - poetry installation single-channel video 6 min 30 secs, 2022 @ Imaginary Z Gallery, Hangzhou, China/ Poems look into their mirrors, shadows, shapes and lands, practising the formation of a longing, a memory, a ritual. How does the body performs the desire of words/objects to move?

**悬停 Hovering** - video and sign language poetry series, 2021-2022 /Nature is never outside us. All corners of the urban space have long been inseparable from our bodies. Refusing the human/nature division means that we need to be in constant conversation with the more-than-human world, and keep inviting other movements into us: becoming otherwise, and in this case, becoming birds. In 悬停 series, I invite my friends and collaborators Yanfei and Baizong to translate some of my bird video works into sign language, and it soon become a dance with the birds, and our collective choreography through which we expand and shape each other. By watching/filming the steps, pauses, dives, gazes of birds, and transforming them into our own body through signing, could we inhabitie the birds? When our body is the study room to listen to nature, would we find other ways of communicating, encountering and being, would we start to remember the rituals of dreaming and transforming化物?

**Sometimes a feather** - video, 6 min 19 secs, 2022, in 悬停 video and sign language poetry series with Yanfei Li, in Zhongshan, China, and Rotterdam, Netherlands

**The Ensemble of Moans** - Marie Tučková, with Mariana Hradilková, Raffia Li and Rebeka Maxová, 2022, Move Festival, @Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

**descending notes** - still from film by Lou Lou Sainsbury, written and performed with Ada M. Patterson and Raffia Li, @IFFR, Rotterdam, NL and @Gasworks, London, UK.

**To all the shapes falling at different/the same present/absent times/time I-我 we/us-我们you-你/你们...** - single-channel video and performance, 20 min, 2021 performers: Raffia Li, Miiel Ferráez, Marie Tucková´, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Miyoung Chang, Maoyi, and Yanfei Li (in video) at Understory Chant, The Dutch Art Institute, in collaboration with Sonsbeek 20- 24, 25 August 2021, Posttheater, Arnhem, Netherlands / How do we find rhythm with each other? How does language connect us with each other, and how is this rhythm disrupted by the virus? A playfulness emerges, a melancholy, through food, through song, through which we may or may not have belonging. I'm struck by the vignettes, the disruption of theater space, which becomes a microcosm of the disruption of the study program, finding a place to be in the Netherlands…ways to find commonality and how to cross borders, how to bridge corners, how to care for each other in this time. (Review by Barbie Asante)

**吾丧我 How do I lose I** - single-channel video and performance, 20-30 min, 2021 performers: Raffia Li, Miiel Ferráez, Iga Swiesciak, and Yanfei Li (in video) at Performing Arts Forum, Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, France/ This performance is a playful and expansive research about languages as sites/landscapes for collective subjectivity, working through an ancient text from Zhuangzi, a Taoist literature, and the different definitions of an “I” in Chinese characters, as “我”, a position of holding a weapon, or a kind of tilting ; as “吾”, the five entrances/exits in the encountering and sensing. What would happen if 吾 can lose 我? It plays with the body in action of writing “我-I” with hand and chopsticks, in the air, and on water, on purposely producing the kind of writing that would disappear, playing with the idea of a constantly disappearing “I”, but also bringing up front the question of what counts as writing, and criticszing the performance itself using a highly sighted and hearing oriented format, reflecting the hierarchy of senses in a neurotypical world / Photo: Miyoung Chang

**Touch? Tapping is so00 nice!** - Lecture performance, 20-25 min, 2020 English Voice: Francesca Hawker Performed at Radio Kootwijk, Netherlands/This lecture performance is a post-ableist experiment through multi-layering of languages, and the in-betweens. It is mainly delivered through me typing, with my friend Francesca’s voice reading out what appears on the screen. It challenges the expectations of an ableist “efficient”society, and creates pauses, time to breathe, space for mistakes and the playfulness of delay. The shifts between American sign language, Chinese sign language, spoken and written Chinese, and English, makes“the fluidity and new body land” possible, as what I have learnt/unlearnt from being with my Deaf friends and collaborators. It also tapped into Protactile movement and language, lead by the DeafBlind community in the U.S, and John Lee Clark’s Protactile poem based on touch, and his Distantism theory criticizing “the privileging of the distance senses of hearing and vision”, bringing the audience into the in-between languages, gestures, and the possibilities in the not-yet-becoming / Photo: Baha Görkem Yalım

The Ensemble of Moans

Datum: 20-10-2022 t/m 21-10-2022

Locatie: Centre Pompidou

In samenwerking met: Centre Pompidou

The Ensemble of Moans, Marie Tučková in collaboration with Mariana Hradilková, Raffia Li and Rebeka Maxová, Festival MOVE, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.

https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/h1jD7i2

INVESTIGATING THE DIALECTIC OF ARRIVAL

Datum: 15-09-2022 t/m 15-12-2022

Locatie: Goethe-Institut Rotterdam

In samenwerking met: Goethe-Institut Rotterdam

Soupspoon collective residency.

https://www.goethe.de/ins/nl/nl/kul/gin/ssp.html

Descending Notes

Datum: 07-07-2022 t/m 18-09-2022

Locatie: Gasworks

In samenwerking met: Gasworks

Descending Notes. Video. 20 mins. Lou Lou Sainsbury in collaboration with Ada M Patterson and Raffia Li. 2022. Commissioned by Gasworks for Lou Lou Sainsbury's exhibition Earth is a Deadname, Freelands Gasworks Partnership.

https://www.gasworks.org.uk/exhibitions/earth-is-a-deadname/

Shaping words Melting words

Datum: 12-03-2022 t/m 19-03-2022

Locatie: Kunstinstituut Melly

In samenwerking met: Kunstinstituut Melly

Body and language workshop, with Jascha Blume.

https://www.kunstinstituutmelly.nl/en/engage/1302-training-shaping-words-melting-words

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