Paper Offerings
Folding origami dim sum for our table of remembering
Join Red Canary Song on May 25th for a day of dim sum origami making and view our installation Touch the Heart at MoMA PS1 Homeroom for The Greater New York Exhibition.
A direct translation of the Cantonese phrase dim sum, “Touch the Heart” encapsulates Red Canary Song’s mutual-aid framework. The dim sum table is where outreach workers gather with community members to offer sustenance-in a merging of resource sharing, conviviality, and comfort food. Among our community, food carries stories of migration, of bodily care and desire, of grieving and longing, and provisions of cultural knowledge. Participants will create origami sculptures resembling dim sum dishes and other forms of sustenance, considering care as an essential practice.
During each workshop session, participants are invited to write a brief message-a wish, offering, or gesture of care-and fold it inside their paper dumpling. These messages may remain private, be shared, or exchanged, reflecting how care circulates quietly through community.
Workshops are welcome to all ages and will take place during 3 sessions throughout the day:
1–1:45 p.m.
2–2:45 p.m.
3–3:45 p.m.
With support from the Astoria Workers Project, RCS is teaching migrant workers how to navigate the public transit system to access free spaces, such as libraries and museums. In line with our values, Nothing about Us, without Us, we are chaperoning workers to the exhibition throughout the season, to view and take ownership of the installation that their stories and guidance have supported.
The Homeroom exhibit is a space that feels like a breath of relief, a sanctum that attempts to hold the complexities of violence, racism, and misogyny, that are intertwined with practices of sex work, healing, transformation, and migration. The pink, sheer curtains are meant to emulate both the gentle power and precarious nature of bodywork. But RCS’s daily work is on the streets, in the prisons, detention centers, and courtrooms that are pitted against workers.
RCS interpreter has reported that even the court-interpretation training is laden with anti-trafficking propaganda that influences how court interpreters view migrant massage workers and sex workers.
To support our work, pay for OMNY cards, feed workers, and pay our interpreters, please consider donating.
OTHER UPCOMING COMMUNITY SHOUTS:
May 22 & 23rd: OUCHIES Festival: is a community arts festival featuring imaginative works of music, dance, theater, performance art, puppetry, and film.
20+ artists envision a more just, healthy, or sustainable world.
The festival also includes workshops, skillshares, group discussions, wellness services, tabling from community orgs, and vending from local artists. Stay late on Saturday for DJs, drag, dancing, and more :) Red Canary Song will be there tabling on Sat the 22nd!
SHIMBURUM, a new korean translation collective dedicated to movement spaces, is hosting their first workshop series over the summer. Over July and August, each will work on a translation piece that would directly serve korean-speaking organizers at home and abroad, with goals to develop closer and more intentional relationships between language workers and cultural workers.
Sign up open till 6/15 at tinyurl.com/shimburum1
Learn more on IG SHIMBURUM
Get tattoo’d at Shanzhai Trading Co: Support Queer Trans GNC tattoo and political organizing space or donate to help save the studio. RCS family and organizing hub for BIPOC fundraisers for trans surgeries and mutual aid.
May 31st: SUPPORT Bay Area SWrs: Our SW family in the Bay Area are throwing an IWD party and need community support! Without additional funding, BAWS will close by 2027. The hurdles to institutional funding for a peer-led SWorker org are real and significant. BWS summer fundraiser Pleasure4Ever on May 31st at @studsf in SF
May 31: Sex Worker Sunday at Judson Memorial Church 11am more info TBA