Touching Grass
Tauraro means Star in Hausa. Last year we took ample time off to dive deeper into the visioning events of the few years to orient our selves to our guiding star: Each of You! Our mission was to re-evaluate our goals, what our communities need, our wins and learning experiences. We analyzed projects including legislation and policy we've supported tangentially or directly that we believed would build a stronger quality of life for QTBIPOC people and boost a globally connected creative and open source media mycology centering Black Indigenous and Greater Globally Native media makers from here in the Pacific Northwest
Like many arts and sciences non-profits we found ourselves with smaller resources. Federal cuts and dissolving infrastructure in a depressive economy, although daunting, gave us an opportunity to decide what we truly mean to do at Tauraro and what we're about.
In that moment, we chose to continue our annual film festival and place our residency, archive project and classes on a temporary hold so that we could better listen to community needs, calibrate more supportive production and program calendars, organize siloed media and archive projects, lay foundations for distribution for our artists and assess mutual aid options for our communities. We consulted with our collaborators to map strategies that could still reach Two Spirit, trans and queer Black, Indigenous and other communities of color with film guidance, helpful resources, archival power and accessible third spaces that go beyond dispensing knowledge by empowering wisdom shares and networking to be sustainable practices.
We will be bringing back our creative and technical training classes into the residency and offer these trainings to the greater public. These classes are designed to help people become self sufficient and to more easily be able to pass on what they learn. Classes will cover multi-media, immersive art and story telling, documentation and technical literacy.
The archival projects (film, traditional artifacts and equitable journalists) will expand to connect artifacts and data first across Turtle Island and then to our connections in other parts of the world that we’ve been so fortunate to learn from. This is a movement and we want to thoughtfully accelerate it’s momentum and usefulness in the todays timeline of the AI arms race. Our steps will remain Open Source and community led.
Our partnerships will be reflecting more accessible and frequent community events and specific collaborations in data gathering and analysis that continue to help Pacific Northwest Black and Native trans and queer people get connected to the rest of the world and for the rest of the world to be connected to us. We do a serious injustice to ourselves to cut out collaboration with new partners and avenues, which only makes artists, media makers and documentarians more at the mercy of the powers that be. It is a soft erosion that we aim to resist.
For our OG members, friends and collaborators, we’re thankful for your trust and support and for those finding us for the first time, we invite you to become a monthly donor this Pride Season or contribute to our RESIDENCY FUNDRAISER , to come out to events with us and discover new avenues of community celebration.
We're very glad to still be out here connecting with you in ever more innovative ways involving filmmakers, artists and Indigi-futurists in changing the main stream and kitchen table narratives about the trans and queer melanated continuum.
And we're stoked to announce another packed season of film, events, and unapologetic art.