over art & layout design by Mahban

DYADS is a collaborative storytelling and art project that gathers SWANA women and queers. It was born out of a desire to reclaim and share silenced and untold narratives from our collective familial ancestries. Within each dyad, one shares an ancestral story they understand as queer and/or feminist, and the other interprets/responds through artwork. Story and artwork will live in a book, side-by-side and in relationship.

The coming together of this collective of artists, storytellers, and participatory researchers centers both a love ethic and methodology of refusal, as the collectivity itself is a refusal to allow the politics of borders and heteropatriarchy of the nation-state to dictate our relationships and bond-building. Illuminating collective ancestral narratives makes space for shared emergence inside fragmented experiences of history, self, and community. It also (re)situates participants inside a lineage long denied of many SWANA queers/feminists.