With PASTLIVES, we make mythologies for queer folks- What is queerness if not collective lucid dreaming?

WHO
My name is SasaHara, I am the artist founder of PASTLIVES. I hope you will connect to my words, and join our vision. Welcome to PASTLIVES, an artist-led queer mythological cross-disciplinary project.

Over the past years I have started long-term research on the making of queer mythologies, the vectors of mythological communication and multimedia storytelling. This research has been gathered under the title “SasaHara Past Lives”, taking my body as a catalyst for untold queer stories and giving them a space to exist in for eternity through mythological storytelling. For this research I reconnected with the theater background I gathered as a child for almost 10 years. I reactivated this connection through the drag-transformism craft I have since developed. Combining it with written text, performance direction and collaboration with other artists.

My research process has gained attention and I have been offered the chance to present this project as part of the off program of UNSEEN Amsterdam, as a solo exhibition in the artist community ISO Amsterdam: the exhibition PASTLIVES. Unfortunately, off program projects do not get a budget. This means that if I want to seize this amazing opportunity to develop my work further, support a team of queer identifying artist and create these impactful mythologies for the queer folks, I first will need to source finances for the project. This is why I need you! Now, bare with me, and dive into my world.

WHAT
Mythology shapes imagination, gives codes for metaphors, analogies, and dreams. My passion for the myth started from a very early age swimming through great amounts of literature. I realized the lack of queer representation in most of the referenced myths I encountered when developing my work as a queer performance artist. Though the approach to non-binary gender identity existed in ancient believes, it seems the culturally dominant mythologies (at least from a western European perspective) were archived in writing, and the forces at work in the transfer of oral storytelling to written myth mostly excluded queer narratives. I believe this lack of representation holds an important piece in the marginalization of the queer experience. Being a queer non-binary POC, I suffer from this gatekeeping, and have thus decided to make these mythologies myself and explore the politics at stake in this marginalization.

PASTLIVES is an immersive theater project in the format of an exhibition. The scenography of the theater-work remains after the show to constitute an exhibition that will stay for a few days. This research is based on my writing of queer myths through fantasy literature, then the making of the characters through my drag art, and eventually collaborations with other queer artists to document each story through other medias. In PASTLIVES, I want to develop a new type of theater experiment, where all the stories would connect into one immersive theater format. It will be the presentation of a meta-story through a multimedia theater work. During this immersive piece, the public will sometimes watch videos, sometimes listen to audio works, and eventually watch performers act.

WHY
I started my art practice through drag-transformism, and later incorporated text, sound, and performance. But my goal is to collectively develop a multimedia storytelling practice, exploring the spaces in-between: accessing to more artistic depth through investigating the liminal spaces between disciplines. I grew up doing theater, and as a grown artist I believe that theater can be the way for us to tinker together these different media. Having now explored different crafts, it is time for us to try our first attempt at mixing them. PASTLIVES will be the first step into the multimedia storytelling art I want to develop. Having your support to produce PASTLIVES would allow us to strengthen the connections between the different artists involved in this project, eventually nurturing the community of queer artists of Amsterdam and beyond. Your financial support will also allow us to produce the video and material scenography, the costumes, to fairly pay the artists for both the rehearsal period and the work presentation, to video-document the work for an online audience, and to have the technical support required during the show.

The exact budget of the project is available to anyone who would like to know how the money will be spent, and can be requested by email at [email protected] !

Thank you for reading, and we hopefully stay in touch !

website: https://sasahara.nl/
insta: https://www.instagram.com/the.sasahara/
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alain.chaney