skin to sky: Lanterns, Stories and Mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Festival

Saturday, October 11, 5–7:30PM

FCCW: 3053 Rosslyn St. LA, CA 90065

Info on our space here

Max Participants: 15

Free

This workshop invites participants to reimagine play as a form of creative resistance, celebration, and collective memory. In honor of Mid-Autumn Festival (also known as the Mooncake Festival) we will explore the ritual of recreating simple candle lanterns familiar to the ones Vickie Aravindhan used to play with growing up in Singapore, a tradition rooted in gathering, storytelling, and light. Through the tactile, joyful process of crafting simple candle lanterns, we will reflect on the ceremonial aspects of childhood play and how familiar gestures—cutting, folding, illuminating—can be transformed into acts of remembrance and cultural resilience.

Vickie Aravindhan will reflect on personal experiences from her childhood celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival in Singapore, highlighting the ways in which ritual and tradition are embedded within the playful practices of this holiday. Silvi Naçi will facilitate space for participants to work with play as a language to reclaim and activate public space, considering how childlike wonder and collective making can disrupt relations of force and invite connection in often-overlooked urban environments.

Aravindhan and Naçi invite you to collectively share a space of reflection and joy, readings from selected texts, eating mooncake, and having tea together. Through this intimate gathering, we invite participants to consider how play, ceremony, and public art-making can be woven together to resist erasure, celebrate community, and illuminate shared histories.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Vickie Aravindhan (b. 1993) is an Indian-Chinese Singaporean artist whose practice draws on the iconography and narratives of Indian and Chinese mythology to explore themes of hybridity. Influenced by postcolonial theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, her work examines hybridization within the context of postcolonial Singapore—surfacing traces of forgotten histories, cultural erasure, lost languages, and the impact of globalization.

She received her BA (Hons) from Goldsmiths, University of London (at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore) in 2014, and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2018.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the George Town Arts Festival (Penang, Malaysia), Art Stage (Singapore), the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (Austria), and the State Art Gallery (Hyderabad, India), among others.

Her curatorial projects include The Lands Of at The Reef (Los Angeles), Pseudo-Mythologies: Nothing is True and Everything is Alive at ArtCenter (Downtown Los Angeles), and an upcoming presentation with Artist Curated Projects in collaboration with Eve Fowler.