Club Kaya will present an immersive experienced by its artist-in-residence, Alan Nakagawa, on Wednesday, Feb. 12, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, 909 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles.
Practicing alternative archiving, Nakagawa and others have created 68 micro-operas that correspond to every single book in Kaya’s archive. These operas take the form of interactive sound installations, music, puppetry, and more.
For the last three decades, Kaya Press has been publishing groundbreaking literature from the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora, redefining the literary landscape with award-winning, avant-garde, and expectation-busting works. It is celebrating its 30th anniversary in collaboration with USC’s Visions and Voices and ONE Archives.
Club Kaya was developed to answer the following: What happens when we think of the archive as a place of refuge? How can we engage with the histories of cultural production beyond what is expected?
Guest collaborators, including anti-colonial musician and artist Umi Hsu (“Bitter Party”), Emmy- and Peabody Award–winning filmmaker Elizabeth Ito (“Adventure Time,” “City of Ghosts”), and experimental video artist Nisa Karnsomport, will join Nakagawa in engaging the publisher’s shared history and shared struggle: to make spaces to exist in the fullness of one’s own lived reality.
Drawing inspiration from Kaya’s roots in political activism, queer agit-prop, and experimental feminist movements, Club Kaya reimagines archives as living, transformative spaces of collaboration and creativity — far beyond static collections.
Free admission. RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/club-kaya-an-interactive-experience-performance-and-archive-registration-1080767266989?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
This event also marks the opening of “Portrait of a Publisher as Political Project: 30 Years of Kaya Press.” Elements of Nakagawa’s project and the Kaya Press exhibition will be on view at ONE Archives until April. Info: www.Kaya.com