 I'm Rufina Baslova. We are both from Belarus, whoo-hoo, Belarus in the house. Sorry, had to. I never get to do that. Who knows where Belarus is? Anyone? Anyone? Okay, great. So, Rufina is a political artist who hasn't continued to live in Belarus for a very long time. I immigrated from there as a child. I live here in Chicago and today we're going to talk about doing international solidarity work while living in the diaspora. So, I'm going to start with a question for you. If you could talk a little bit about the work that you do and how your medium connects to the political activations that you do. Yeah. Actually, my main tool I work with is traditional Belarusian embroidery, but through this medium I just depict and I work with the political topics, political issues and currently my work is about political prisoners in Belarus because there are more than 1500 directly like right now in the moment in prisons and the work was developed after the first series where I used ornaments to tell the stories of Belarusian protests in 2020 and this project is, you see the sample here, the project about political prisoners is named framed in Belarus and this is, it's very important to say that this is the collective project. The core is that I create the patterns, like I study the stories and I create the pattern in this traditional white red colors and then I invite a lot of people from like everyone can join the project to stitch one or more stories of political prisoners and then we collect back all the works and try to exhibit them working like now we're working on a big archive on like web page and sorry, yeah for the moment we already have 400 pieces collected from people from like around to 20 countries so and here is the sample how their pattern look like. In the middle there is the hero if I know a heroine, if I know something about the person I add some details there also there is the name and the surname of the political prisoner and above there is the name of the case and below it's actually the short illustration of what happened to the person and one very important thing that in the corner there is a signature of a person who stitched the work. I think we can show the second slide also yeah and also like we work it's very important thing for like in the project so people can work together in groups I mean we also organize workshops where people can meet and share their feelings and thoughts and yes and also it's possible to work alone especially it is very important for people in Belarus where it's just dangerous to together together so and how it works I think we can go back to the first slide we also ask people to share their like in general I would say the project is about stories not only about stories of political prisoners but also about stories of people who joined the project usually they do it because they want to show solidarity because they're empathized with these people struggling in in prisons and we ask these participants to share their thoughts and feelings and actually from these feedbacks we learned a lot so the project somehow have proposed an alternative physical psychological support because the stitching process is very slow and meditative somehow and you have a lot of time to to think about the situation to think about like connections like relations with you and your country and also what like comparing what is happening in Belarus and actually for Belarusians it is somehow an instrument to to work with the with their struggle and feeling like you united with people in general like with other Belarusians in all among all the world and also with like other people so and for people from from other countries it's also a kind of instrument of how to know what is going on there so it has also an educative effort yeah thank you so much for sharing something that just struck out to me when you were talking is the fact that embroidery is such a meditative process and if I understand correctly a lot of your work has been shared through social media so thinking about that kind of like very fast way that folks consume and then the very slow process of actually embroidery and I'm interested in that kind of dichotomy and how in some ways maybe this wouldn't have been possible in another time and also what you mentioned around the fact that it's either illegal or very dangerous to actually protest actively physically in Belarus and then this being a way that folks can participate in solidarity struggles in a way that is decentralized and distributed so yeah if you want to just talk a little bit about how folks in Belarus are responding to this global participation and what you've heard about the impact of it oh yeah about like how the information is spread in media so it's very fast like when they were protesting 2020 I actually had my Instagram account where I just in this technique because it's like traditional and it's very recognizable and somehow I work with cultural codes so everyone like from Belarus or from our region just can see the work and understand like this code speaks like okay this is Belarusian and I know it and also like coding in in this traditional style the contemporary like the modern situations and events were also like super recognizable for people and that's how it became very popular through social media so people just share it and another thing is about the technique of embroidery and stitching the pattern it is very soft and somehow when like we just have plenty of photos and videos like with all the violence and blood and sometimes for people it's very hard to accept like to consume these pictures the technique of like this soft and pretty technique telling these stories were like more acceptable so it also helped to spread the information so people just share it yes and also there as I said there are a lot of stories of people who participate in the project some so somehow they this is very important for them to to find for example connections like we had different stories one a woman from Canada she just maybe I'll ask you later how do you feel she originally she was from Belarus and but she cannot visit her grandmother because of COVID and because of all the situations that happened afterwards but through the project and through the stitching she found this connection with her roots so how did you feel because you saw it also like earlier yeah so I actually found out about your work pretty recently I wish I had known about it in 2020 because I was here watching the protests unfold while at the same time we were having our own you know global movement for black lives and I was also doing a project archiving the prisings here at the same time and I feel like there that's a common thread between our work and actually if you could move down to two more slides yeah that one prior to us meeting and knowing about each other's work I was and still am part of a queer post-soviet Jewish artist collective named Krivor Kolykov and we were creating similar work kind of like reclaiming our traditional cultural practices these scarves read abolition at the mitzvah free Palestine at the mitzvah queer at the mitzvah and re-matriation at the mitzvah and a mitzvah or a mitzvah is the Jewish term for a good deed so reclaiming these concepts that for a lot of us we have been called traitors for we have been shamed about in our own family so these words of like pridat il pasor like always feeling like somehow we are betraying our people by actually participating in solidarity with the press peoples of the world and I I love for in your work the fact that you created a pattern that then becomes accessible to so many folks and I I'm really inspired by that and thinking about how to make this work more decentralized and more and create an invitation for others to participate if you could go to the next slide so the piece that I've been working on since 2020 living our parallel lives not knowing each other is called what time is it and it is inspired by Gracely Boggs and Jimmy Boggs who were Black Power organizers in Detroit and would ask this question what time is it on the clock of the world so in early 2020 when the pandemic first began and a lot of folks were on lockdown I started reaching out to folks that I really admire some of those folks are in this room right now folks like Temfus folks like Ammar folks like Hinesh and asking them this question and having them sit for a portrait over zoom and actually the show is up right now at the Chicago Art Department and we're having a conversation this Saturday that I want to invite folks to that Hinesh is facilitating but just thinking about this idea of solidarity and how do we bring together multiple perspectives for multiple lived identities and also to Temfus project thinking about living archives and how do we take back the power of our own narratives from institutions can we do a time check two minutes any other questions and maybe I just like what I want to say this for my project and I think also for yours it's like very important the cariness so actually it's spreading not only solidarity but like that people care and like also care about health care about mental care and care about other people not being like just selfish and yeah having hope yeah I think that piece around mutual aid and community care is something that's like a connective tissue during the ongoing pandemic yeah I think something a theme that's come up a couple times today is the importance of relationships and interdependence and I think those are ways that we are able to kind of push back on these harmful systems yeah in our one minute left I want to open up to the audience I feel like it's always just the people up here does anyone have a question for us yes it's called Krivoye collective which means Krivoye is like crooked and it refers to our noses and our sexuality any other questions audience breaking the fourth wall yes I did but for streaming I think if anyone here wants to join your embroidery project what should we do go to framed in Belarus.net register Google form and as soon as I have new patterns we will contact you