Saved by Sixian and
On Gathering
Gathering is the tender and thoughtful collection of goods for your kin, and a moment for reunion, for celebration, and for introspection around those goods.
Mindy Seu • On Gathering
Mindy Seu
Stories are entrusted to storytellers by the elders. But these storytellers are not meant to repeat the narrative verbatim; they are expected to understand these stories and, through them, reflect on what the community needs to hear at any given moment
Mindy Seu • On Gathering
Building relationships between things is a form of authorship too.
Mindy Seu • On Gathering
Tools break and containers change, but the urge to tell stories remains. Containers and content can be used to mutually inform the shape of their counterparts, expressing a tender, anti-heroic, communal, and present side of storytelling in place of our received understanding of historical material as heroic, individual, disconnected, and past. As w... See more
shiftspace.pub • On Gathering
Perhaps gathering stories is radical because it refuses to give the gatherer all of the credit. The collector-collection dynamic is deliberately broken. The person who puts it together is only one of many parts.
shiftspace.pub • On Gathering
Oral histories, like publications, bind people. After a conversation, all parties maintain ownership of what transpired, and they continue to hold ties to one another.
shiftspace.pub • On Gathering
Stories are entrusted to storytellers by the elders. But these storytellers are not meant to repeat the narrative verbatim; they are expected to understand these stories and, through them, reflect on what the community needs to hear at any given moment. This temporal gathering, both in and around a story, acknowledges the personal subjectivities al... See more
Mindy Seu • On Gathering
Brown also built upon Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1984), declaring, “I believe conversation is not a master’s tool. I believe being in a circle, in a community, is not a master’s tool.” Here, she describes gathering people to share stories as a web, a network, as a finding aid for like-minded voices.
shiftspace.pub • On Gathering
In an interview with Roxana Fabius, Patricia M. Hernandez, and me for The Scalability Project (2020), adrienne maree brown described relationships like a spiderweb—diaphanous yet strong, thick yet porous. “A web allows things to fall through, like a sieve,” she said. “Some things are not meant to be caught.” I like to think of these webs as citatio... See more