The SEAD Project Podcast The Southeast Asian Diaspora (SEAD) Project

ຂອບໃຈ. cảm ơn. ua tsaug. អរគុណ. thank you for listening.

Click the linked text, as follows, to learn more about ⁠⁠Mid Autumn Film Night 2022 (MAFN)⁠⁠. Click the linked text to view select films from featured MAFN artists on ⁠⁠SEAD’s Vimeo page.⁠⁠
Recorded in Nov 2022. Explicit language was permitted for each MAFN Talk conversation, though is not present in this conversation.

Find Poupou's short film "Mali | ມະລິ" on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/756885919

Our guest today is Pitivanh "Poupou" Phamuang (she/her), who is based in Vientiane, Laos and was studying at National Institute of Fine Arts at the time of the conversation, majoring Film and Animation in the department of Visual Communication Design. "Mali" is the first screenplay that she wrote, about the budding romance between two high school Lao girls. Poupou also performed the role as assistant director on the production team, and assistant editor on post-production.

In our conversation, Deryck and Tri chat with Poupou about the day-to-day living in Vientiane as an arts student that informs much of Poupou's creative journey, her aspirations to becoming an animator, and the challenges that will come with that as a Laos-based artist.

Please send any inquiries regarding MAFN and MAFN Talk to Tri (he/anh/em pronouns) at ⁠⁠tri@theseadproject.org⁠⁠. Send inquiries regarding The SEAD Project to ⁠⁠hi@theseadproject.org⁠⁠.

Throw The SEAD Project and Fermented Feelings lots of love by going into your iTunes or Apple Podcast app and rating Fermented Feelings 5 stars!!

A brief of what the MAFN Talk podcast series came from: This past Oct 2022, The SEAD Project hosted our Mid-Autumn Film Night, or MAFN - an indoor screen feast of Southeast Asian past, present, and futures made by SEA filmmakers near and far and was a portal for the local Twin Cities SEA community to see through the artistic eyes of SEA creatives.

Listen to our interviews with featured film artists from MAFN. Also, check out our Rad Café 2021 conversation series, on SEA diasporic political co-learning.

These films are love letters inked in the sinking struggles, sojourns, and unsettled worlds that make up the complex and beautiful weight of our Southeast Asian communities.

Basic Timestamps / Podcast chapters

TBA

Music: "River in the Jungle" by SnowMusicStudio


---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theseadproject/message

ຂອບໃຈ. cảm ơn. ua tsaug. អរគុណ. thank you for listening.

Click the linked text, as follows, to learn more about ⁠⁠Mid Autumn Film Night 2022 (MAFN)⁠⁠. Click the linked text to view select films from featured MAFN artists on ⁠⁠SEAD’s Vimeo page.⁠⁠
Recorded in Nov 2022. Explicit language was permitted for each MAFN Talk conversation.

Our guest today is Loan Hoang (she/her). You can find more about her, including her featured film for SEAD entitled "things i wished someone told me when i was younger," at her website, sincerelyloan.com and under her "film" page.


Loan Hoang is a Vietnamese American producer and writer based in Los Angeles. As an immigrant and woman of color, she is passionate about sharing stories that authentically portray her communities’ lived experiences and intersectionalities. Her work has been featured as a Staff Pick on Vimeo and selected for Athens International Film Festival, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, MARFA Film Festival, New Orleans International Film Festival, RAW Film Festival, San Diego Asian Film Festival (Best Narrative Short), Seattle Asian Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Viet International Film Festival, and OUTFEST Fusion Film Festival.

Loan is currently writing a miniseries showcasing underground Vietnamese youth culture in the early 2000s based on her experience during that time with Orange County’s Vietnamese Catholic Scouts community.

In our conversation, Deryck and Tri hear about Loan's being part of the last graduating classes at UCLA to pursue a major and attain a degree in Southeast Asian Studies and the Singapore-based Asian American studies class that came with it, her loneliness of being a K-pop enthusiast in the early aughts, how her new adventures in film directing and production has been a big creative break from her many years of breakdancing, why Asians gotta stop fighting each other, her pet dog Zoe's real-life stand off against the visiting mailman, and much more.

Please send any inquiries regarding MAFN and MAFN Talk to Tri (he/anh/em pronouns) at ⁠⁠tri@theseadproject.org⁠⁠. Send inquiries regarding The SEAD Project to ⁠⁠hi@theseadproject.org⁠⁠.

Throw The SEAD Project and Fermented Feelings lots of love by going into your iTunes or Apple Podcast app and rating Fermented Feelings 5 stars!!

A brief of what the MAFN Talk podcast series came from: This past Oct 2022, The SEAD Project hosted our Mid-Autumn Film Night, or MAFN - an indoor screen feast of Southeast Asian past, present, and futures made by SEA filmmakers near and far and was a portal for the local Twin Cities SEA community to see through the artistic eyes of SEA creatives.

Listen to our interviews with featured film artists from MAFN. Also, check out our Rad Café 2021 conversation series, on SEA diasporic political co-learning.

These films are love letters inked in the sinking struggles, sojourns, and unsettled worlds that make up the complex and beautiful weight of our Southeast Asian communities.



Basic Timestamps / Podcast chapters

TBA

Music: "River in the Jungle" by SnowMusicStudio


---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theseadproject/message

ຂອບໃຈ. cảm ơn. ua tsaug. អរគុណ. thank you for listening.

Click the linked text, as follows, to learn more about ⁠Mid Autumn Film Night 2022 (MAFN)⁠. Click the linked text to view select films from featured MAFN artists on ⁠SEAD’s Vimeo page.⁠
Recorded in Nov 2022. Explicit language was permitted for each MAFN Talk conversation.

Find Sarah's short film at the following link, using the code "baila" to access it for the remainder of 2023.


"30 x 3 virgin remy: $200 OBO": https://vimeo.com/462756988

Our guest today is Sarah Nguyễn (they/she), a movement and information researcher with experience exploring dance and data in Sacramento, San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Seattle. Their research explores the ephemerality of movement, embodied practice and performance, and how humans make, retain, and reconstruct memory as acts of sensemaking around identity and events. Through research, movement, and intermedia collaborations, Sarah creates live and digital performances to inform and spark critical inquiry among viewers and participants, as community members. Their work has been featured in Radical Networks NYC, !!Con Santa Cruz, CA, Northwest Film Forum, The Craft Performance & Brew NYC, and Southeast Asia x Seattle Film & Literature Festival. Previously, she was a librarian for Luna Dance Institute, an archivist for the Mark Morris Dance Group Archive Project, and a 2021-2022 Dance/USA Fellow in Dance Archiving and Preservation for AXIS Dance Company. Currently, she is supporting efforts to preserve the cultural heritage of the social dance movement, Hustle.

In our conversation, Deryck and Tri hear about Sarah's experience in archival work and movement arts that converged in their experimental short film and oral storytelling project about their mom, Hoang, and a delicate chapter of her life spent in Vietnam.

Please send any inquiries regarding MAFN and MAFN Talk to Tri (he/anh/em pronouns) at ⁠tri@theseadproject.org⁠. Send inquiries regarding The SEAD Project to ⁠hi@theseadproject.org⁠.

Throw The SEAD Project and Fermented Feelings lots of love by going into your iTunes or Apple Podcast app and rating Fermented Feelings 5 stars!!

A brief of what the MAFN Talk podcast series came from: This past Oct 2022, The SEAD Project hosted our Mid-Autumn Film Night, or MAFN - an indoor screen feast of Southeast Asian past, present, and futures made by SEA filmmakers near and far and was a portal for the local Twin Cities SEA community to see through the artistic eyes of SEA creatives.

Listen to our interviews with featured film artists from MAFN. Also, check out our Rad Café 2021 conversation series, on SEA diasporic political co-learning.

These films are love letters inked in the sinking struggles, sojourns, and unsettled worlds that make up the complex and beautiful weight of our Southeast Asian communities.



Basic Timestamps / Podcast chapters

TBA

Music: "River in the Jungle" by SnowMusicStudio


---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theseadproject/message

Hello! | Suostei / សួស្តី | Sabaidi / ສະບາຍດີ | Nyob zoo | Xin chào

This is Tri Vo, Cultural Organizer here at SEAD. I am launching a new program through the SEAD Project called Brave Harbors.

You can find a brief description of the program’s intent at ⁠tinyurl.com/beamapmaker⁠⁠.

This podcast conversation will refer to this IG post @theseadproject to guide the podcast host's responses to the question: What's in the SEA Atlas? What do ideas of Southeast Asia and diaspora look like to our podcast hosts, Tri and Charmaine? Is the term "Southeast Asia" useful? Confusing? Biased? What would be useful for Southeast Asian-origin peoples to have for reference, review, and discovery in a SEA Atlas?


This podcast episode is a conversation between two staff members at The SEAD Project: Tri Vo (he/anh) and Charmaine Balisalisa (they/them/siya), who are the Cultural Organizers and Leader Visual Designer, respectively, in addition to being the co-creators of the Brave Harbors project.

_________________________________

We want to build new tools for SEA-origin peoples that are defined, designed, and made by us. Through a project like Brave Harbors, we want to help SEA-origin peoples become more independent from the systems that trap us more than they free us to build new systems that actually benefit us and communities.

On behalf of The SEAD Project, we want to connect with Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Viet peoples who deeply care for their communities and want to make change in solidarity, our Mapmakers. A Brave Harbors Mapmaker has their own map of experiences and working knowledge of certain systems.

We’re excited to create more comprehensive maps of stories, histories, and challenges that our people can use to navigate tumultuous seas of systems and -isms—together.

This is how you can start your journey with us as a Mapmaker:

1) Submit! your responses at ⁠tinyurl.com/beamapmaker⁠ to help SEAD better understand what social issues that SEAD's core audiences care about.

2) Converse with me!- by booking a time to talk via ⁠my Calendly scheduler⁠: ⁠tinyurl.com/mapmakerchat⁠. Chat with me about what has impacted you and your communities, which can include many things like ethnicity, education level, private/public/self-employed sector worker, and the list goes on.

Email Tri at ⁠tri@theseadproject.org⁠ and/or Charmaine at charmaine@theseadproject.org with all your feelings, curiosities, and questions in relation to Brave Harbors.

Share this podcast and relevant Mapmakers links with other Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Viet folks you know who would be interested in map-making with us. *Please feel encouraged to submit a response if you identify as Southeast Asian though do not belong to our focus communities of Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Viet groups. Your input will help The SEAD Project in mapping out our bigger picture work over time.


Thanks for inspiring The SEAD Project to keep growing and being a better resource for community. Together, let's set sail for brave new SEAs.

⁠Click here⁠⁠ to start your Mapmaker journey with us; share ⁠https://tinyurl.com/beamapmaker⁠ with your Southeast Asian-origin peers and kinfolk.



Basic Timestamps / Podcast chapters

(0:00) Music and intros

(3:30) What's in the SEA Atlas?

(7:00) Why identify as "Asian"?

(11:15) Cultural preservation: when does it become important for diaspora children?

(15:49) Gatekeeping and fear as cultural preservation

(25:40) Can SEA be the new Asian?

(29:10) Entitled "peace" and compassionate conflict

(37:10) Portals to connect ideas, SEA Atlas

(42:18) SEA shapeshifts and contexts

(50:08) SEA as tool for... what?



Music: "River in the Jungle" by SnowMusicStudio


---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theseadproject/message

Hello! | Suostei / សួស្តី | Sabaidi / ສະບາຍດີ | Nyob zoo | Xin chào

This is Tri Vo, Cultural Organizer here at SEAD. I am launching a new program through the SEAD Project called Brave Harbors.

You can find a brief description of the program’s intent at tinyurl.com/beamapmaker⁠.

Transcript for this podcast episode can be found here: [Transcript] Introducing: Brave Harbors

This podcast episode is an introduction to the commitment to high-value narrative change via community-informed workshops and programming that Brave Harbors will be a container for the remainder of 2023, and possibly beyond. In this solo episode featuring myself, Tri Vo, you will hear some of the perspectives and themes, both historical and contemporary, that have impacted people of Southeast Asian-origin, or SEA-origin.

The team behind Brave Harbors will be guided by these perspectives, themes, and the input from participating community members, who we will henceforth call "Mapmakers", to design forthcoming programming that can create space for courageous conversations around the hard dialogues that may help SEA-origin peoples come together and change narratives and policies that uplift our communities.

We want to build new tools for SEA-origin peoples that are defined, designed, and made by us. Through a project like Brave Harbors, we want to help SEA-origin peoples become more independent from the systems that trap us more than they free us to build new systems that actually benefit us and communities.

On behalf of The SEAD Project, we want to connect with Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Viet peoples who deeply care for their communities and want to make change in solidarity, our Mapmakers. A Brave Harbors Mapmaker has their own map of experiences and working knowledge of certain systems.

We’re excited to create more comprehensive maps of stories, histories, and challenges that our people can use to navigate tumultuous seas of systems and -isms—together.

This is how you can start your journey with us as a Mapmaker:

1) Submit! your responses at tinyurl.com/beamapmaker to help SEAD better understand what social issues that SEAD's core audiences care about.

2) Converse with me!- by booking a time to talk via my Calendly scheduler: tinyurl.com/mapmakerchat. Chat with me about what has impacted you and your communities, which can include many things like ethnicity, education level, private/public/self-employed sector worker, and the list goes on.

Email Tri at tri@theseadproject.org with all your feelings, curiosities, and questions in relation to Brave Harbors.

Share this podcast and relevant Mapmakers links with other Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Viet folks you know who would be interested in map-making with us. *Please feel encouraged to submit a response if you identify as Southeast Asian though do not belong to our focus communities of Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Viet groups. Your input will help The SEAD Project in mapping out our bigger picture work over time.

Thanks for inspiring The SEAD Project to keep growing and being a better resource for community.

Click here⁠ to start your Mapmaker journey with us; share https://tinyurl.com/beamapmaker with your Southeast Asian-origin peers and kinfolk.


---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theseadproject/message

ຂອບໃຈ. cảm ơn. ua tsaug. អរគុណ. thank you for listening.

Set sail on a new adventure with us: tinyurl.com/beamapmaker⁠

Ahoy! ⚓

Let me introduce myself as Captain Trịnh (inspired by this Viet musician), the Harbor Captain on a new comic-style storytelling journey for our SEAD focus communities called Brave Harbors. We’re on a quest to create more comprehensive maps of stories, histories, and challenges that our people can use to navigate tumultuous seas of systems and -isms—together.

Read on to see how your input will have a big chance at becoming illustrated into the Brave Harbors world!

You can find a brief description of the program’s intent and definition of "Mapmakers" in this linked set of images.

On behalf of The SEAD Project, we want to connect with Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Viet peoples* who deeply care for their communities and want to make change in solidarity, our Mapmakers. A Brave Harbors Mapmaker has their own map of experiences and working knowledge of certain systems.

We’re excited to create more comprehensive maps of stories, histories, and challenges that our people can use to navigate tumultuous seas of systems and -isms—together.

This is how you can start your journey with us as a Mapmaker:


Submit! your responses at tinyurl.com/beamapmaker to help SEAD better understand what social issues that SEAD's core audiences care about.
Converse with Tri Vo, the creator of Brave Harbors, by booking a time to talk via his Calendly scheduler. Chat with us about what has impacted you and your communities, which can include many things like ethnicity, education level, private/public/self-employed sector worker, and the list goes on.

To hear a conversation demo of the survey questions, go to our podcast page by searching “The SEAD Project Podcast” on all major podcast streaming apps and listen to the episode featuring Charmaine, SEAD’s Lead Visual Designer (they/them/siya pronouns) and illustrator of the Brave Harbors comic series, prompting Tri to respond to the Mapmakers survey questions.
Let’s really dig into what “practicing solidarity” as a “Southeast Asian diaspora” really means and how we strengthen our attempts at solidarity work with principled courage, commitment, and direction.

Share this podcast and Mapmakers survey link with other Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Viet folks you know who would be interested in mapmaking with us.

*Please feel encouraged to submit a response if you identify as Southeast Asian though do not belong to our focus communities of Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Viet groups. Your input will help The SEAD Project in mapping out our bigger picture work over time.

We'd love to hear your thoughts, feelings, and reactions to this campaign. Thanks for inspiring The SEAD Project to keep growing and being a better resource for community.

Anchors away! See you at the harbor. Click here to start your Mapmaker journey with us.



Timestamps / Podcast chapters

(00:00) skit: Captain Trịnh and Archiver Nic

(01:25) Tri and Charmaine introduce themselves

(02:30) Defining: Brave Harbors and Mapmakers
(05:20) Mapmaker Survey Intro

(07:25) Qs: Our relationship to "Southeast Asia" as diaspora
(14:20) Qs: Engaging with SEAD, beyond Brave Harbors 

(19:02) Share a little about yourself!

(23:40) tinyurl.com/beamapmaker⁠ Converse with Tri!



Music: "River in the Jungle" by SnowMusicStudio


---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theseadproject/message