INTERWOVEN: WEAVING TOGETHER OUR STORIES & TRADITIONS: THREE WORKSHOPS BY EMILY BASA BESA

The workshops are free; donations are appreciated. 🙂

All are welcome, no previous experience needed.
These workshops are suitable for children aged 10 and up.
Children must be accompanied by an adult. Mental Health Arts Space is a partially accessible space (ground floor), the main entrance is 86.5 cm wide. The bathroom might not be acccessible for larger wheelchair users.

These workshops center the experiences of the Asian diaspora. All are welcome!

The workshops can be attended individually, or collectively, in sequence. They are an opportunity to share our stories and experiences and practice care for ourselves and for the collective. The first workshop will focus on textiles or fabric, the second on centerpieces or altars, and the third on stories and songs.

WORKSHOP #3 –

INHERITANCE: TENDING TO OUR STORIES & TRADITIONS

SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 2-4pm

Regardless of our family constellations and how near or far we are to our families, there are certain stories, fables, histories and songs that carry memories, preserve our oral traditions and connect us with our kin, inherited, made or chosen. Everyone is invited to bring a song, poem, story connected to personal, familial or cultural history. We will share these stories and connect through voice, song, stories. We will also practice some reflective, mindful and somatic exercises.

Please note: During this workshop, there will be two artists present for the purposes of artistic documentation: Meikey To (who did the wonderful poster & graphics for Caring Histories!) will be collecting impressions, thoughts and stories for their zine documentation, and Hany Tea will be archiving sonic impulses, voices and dialogue for their sonic/audio documentation piece. Are you excited already or what! Both the zine and audio documentation will be made available on the Caring Histories project website end July! 🙂

Emily Basa Besa is a facilitator of social practices, a meditation and mindfulness teacher, and a creative consultant working at the intersection of art, care, and collective meaning-making. Her practice centers on creating spaces where individuals and groups can feel at home in themselves through embodied presence, storytelling, shared ritual, and therapeutic processes practiced collectively. She works across retreats, workshops, ceremonies, and socially-engaged art contexts, drawing on mindfulness-based, trauma-sensitive, and somatic approaches.

Through ritual, reflection, somatic practices, and shared meals, she creates participatory formats that support collective presence and dialogue. Using her Filipino heritage and
diasporic experience as the framework, she engages questions of lineage, exchange, hybridity, movement, and continuity, inviting participants to reflect on their own personal and cultural lineages/narratives. Her work is grounded in relationship with the natural world, encouraging attunement to inner experience alongside landscape, seasonality, weather, celestial bodies, cycles of nature, and our more-than-human relations.

Meikey To (they/them) is a freelance illustrator, comic artist, and political educator based in Hamburg. Since 2017, Meikey has created spaces for collective storytelling and solidary knowledge exchange through comics, zines, exhibitions, and workshops, using analog and digital media as political tools. Their practice focuses on postcolonial memory, diasporic experiences, and intersections of race, gender, and the body.

Meikey‘s work includes illustrations for Carlsen Verlag and Goethe-Institut Beijing. A comic essay on food, diaspora, and cultural appropriation appeared in the Italian magazine Internazionale. In 2025, Meikey presented a comic exhibition on race, body, and gender at Mikropol RBO and a group exhibition at Frappant, for which they developed a digital-to-analog first-aid zine generator against state surveillance and police violence.

Meikey is currently completing their studies in Illustration at HAW Hamburg, focusing on anti-discriminatory visual language and graphic storytelling. Their current project is a comic tracing migration, ruptures, Hakka heritage, and the deconstruction of time as a postcolonial narrative strategy.

hany tea is an interdisciplinary artist, sonic practitioner, and researcher working at the intersections of diaspora, memory, and care through sound, oral history, and storytelling. Their practice centres collective listening and transgenerational dialogue as ways of engaging with lived experience, migration histories, and forms of social and emotional labour.

In 2025, Hany curated Listening to the Past – Hearing the Present at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), a project that brought together former contract workers from Cuba,
Mozambique, and Vietnam and their children through workshops, shared listening, storytelling, and musical practice, positioning music as a medium of remembrance and intergenerational exchange.

From March to June 2025, Hany presented an audio installation at Dump Gallery in Almaty, Kazakhstan as part of Kitchen Conversations, tracing layered soundscapes of
memory, labour, and intimacy through fragments of recordings while cooking with parents. Hany is also a member of the Mutating Kinship Lab (MKL), an artistic think-tank fostering dialogue and collaboration within Asian diaspora artistic communities in Germany.

Please sign up for the workshops using the form below. You will receive a confirmation email from us. If you cannot attend, please notify us so we can give your spot to someone else. 🙂

Name

Which workshop are you signing up for?

Do you have any accessibility requirements? If yes, please write them here.

Is there anything else you would like us to know?

How did you hear about the workshop? (e.g. through a friend/ on the MHAS website/ via community association like ALPAS Pilipinas)

Do you identify as Filipino or of South East Asian heritage? (Please select one)

I confirm that I am registering for this in-person event and will attend only if I am not feeling unwell/experiencing medical symptoms (e.g. cough, cold, fever, etc.).