The Asian Futures Collective is the creative core group of the Asian Empowerment Community in and around Zurich, organizing projects and events with and for the Asian Community. Since the Empowerment Brunch in April 2024, they’ve hosted the “UnConference”, a workshop program at Roxy Bar Birsfelden, a Congeegathering at Ausstellungsraum Klingental in Basel, an exhibition with performances at toxi space Zurich and latest, a Songkran-gathering at Zentralwäscherei Zurich, always aiming to create spaces for exchange, care, and collective dreaming.
For Ce qui dérive résiste encore, the representatives Vanessa Bosch, Stanford Chen, Ni Daodao 倪島島, Thi My Lien Nguyen, Kate Lim, He Shen 何珅, Errna Zainal, and Kay Zhang will explore how collective relationalties flow through their individual practices. Over the course of a day, they will interweave workshops, lecture performances, and food practices to explore Asian heritage, diasporic perspectives, and forms of collective learning.
For How We Come Together, the Asian Futures Collective gathers to explore how Asian diasporic practices culture and community can create new spaces of relation. The programme moves through ancestral memory, embodied knowledge, more-than-human kinship, and collective learning. The contributions ask how we gather across displacement and differences, and how 'coming together' can become a form of resistance, healing, and imagination.
","accordion":[{"type":"accordion","content":{"title":"Event at L'Arcade — Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève","maincontent":"[{\"content\":{\"anchor\":\"\",\"anchorlabel\":\"\",\"size\":\"regular\",\"alignment\":\"left\",\"text\":\"Rue de Chantepoulet 1-3
1201 Genève
Opening times
Wednesday to Sunday (1 pm—6 pm)
Open to all, free admission, upon mandatory registration.
Limited capacity.
Rue de Chantepoulet 1-3
1201 Genève
Opening times
Wednesday to Sunday (1 pm—6 pm)
Open to all, free admission, upon mandatory registration.
Limited capacity.
Duration 60 - 90mins max, with ongoing beverage offer to all throughout the day
(Price TBC)
Through this session, we bring our practices into dialogue with one another. While Daodao explores foraging, farming, and preservation as ways of making kin with more-than-human worlds, Shen’s research examines how the Sichuan dialect carries situated forms of knowledge and how the teahouse functions as a porous infrastructure of care, connecting diverse social groups to a broader landscape and deep geological time. Together, we explore how practices of tea drinking, gathering, and spending time together rooted in our shared cultural background can be translated and reimagined within diasporic contexts and beyond.
The collaboration between He Shen 何珅 and Ni Daodao 倪島島 began through connections forged around food and a shared spoken dialect. Together, they explore how practices of living, caring, and healing can persist amid conditions of displacement and uprootedness. Their ongoing collaborations include the food ritual Gathering, the workshop series Tofutopia, and the exhibition More Time to Spend Together.
He Shen 何珅 works with the spatial histories of gender and sexual dissidence in China and across the Asian diaspora. Their research focuses on food narratives—particularly tofu, tea, and rice—as sites of transnational Asian queer resistance. Since 2023, Shen has been a member of the Chair of Architecture and Care at ETH Zurich. Their ongoing PhD research mobilises the Sichuanese dialect to uncover forms of dissent that exceed globalised frameworks of queerness, re-historicising the Sichuanese teahouse as a porous infrastructure of care.
Ni Daodao 倪島島 is an artist whose practice unfolds through maintenance, sustained attention, and material continuation. Working through gardening, fermentation, urushi, stitching, collecting, and repair, they engage with materials and objects shaped by use, circulation, and disposal. Their practice examines how systems of consumption structure relationships between bodies, materials, labour, and time, while attending to fragile processes that endure through repetition, care, and embodied forms of work.
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(Price TBC)
Through this session, we bring our practices into dialogue with one another. While Daodao explores foraging, farming, and preservation as ways of making kin with more-than-human worlds, Shen’s research examines how the Sichuan dialect carries situated forms of knowledge and how the teahouse functions as a porous infrastructure of care, connecting diverse social groups to a broader landscape and deep geological time. Together, we explore how practices of tea drinking, gathering, and spending time together rooted in our shared cultural background can be translated and reimagined within diasporic contexts and beyond.
The collaboration between He Shen 何珅 and Ni Daodao 倪島島 began through connections forged around food and a shared spoken dialect. Together, they explore how practices of living, caring, and healing can persist amid conditions of displacement and uprootedness. Their ongoing collaborations include the food ritual Gathering, the workshop series Tofutopia, and the exhibition More Time to Spend Together.
He Shen 何珅 works with the spatial histories of gender and sexual dissidence in China and across the Asian diaspora. Their research focuses on food narratives—particularly tofu, tea, and rice—as sites of transnational Asian queer resistance. Since 2023, Shen has been a member of the Chair of Architecture and Care at ETH Zurich. Their ongoing PhD research mobilises the Sichuanese dialect to uncover forms of dissent that exceed globalised frameworks of queerness, re-historicising the Sichuanese teahouse as a porous infrastructure of care.
Ni Daodao 倪島島 is an artist whose practice unfolds through maintenance, sustained attention, and material continuation. Working through gardening, fermentation, urushi, stitching, collecting, and repair, they engage with materials and objects shaped by use, circulation, and disposal. Their practice examines how systems of consumption structure relationships between bodies, materials, labour, and time, while attending to fragile processes that endure through repetition, care, and embodied forms of work.
"},"settings":[],"id":"bd3d582a-8f7b-4e83-8ace-725bac38ce02","anchor":"","anchorlabel":""}]},"settings":[],"id":"dd874fc9-46ea-4707-9544-8f0a8b792a72","anchor":null,"anchorlabel":null},{"type":"dropdown","content":{"title":"3:15 pm—4:15 pm | kay zhang and Stan Chen – Research Residency sharing – Taiwan","maincontent":"[{\"content\":{\"anchor\":\"\",\"anchorlabel\":\"\",\"size\":\"regular\",\"alignment\":\"left\",\"text\":\"Online discussion
Our research over a month together exploring topics around grief, ancestral rituals around everyday practices and the relationality of encounters. Presenting how our collaborative processes expands and evolves from a performance towards a research-informed sharing.
As a duo-collective, we are driven by a shared commitment to uncovering and amplifying Asian diaspora stories in Switzerland. Together, we create spaces for collective connection and empowerment through sound, performance, storytelling, and community-building. Our work blends transdisciplinary practices, including somatic movements, sound art, and collaborative methodologies, to foster dialogue, belonging, and resilience. Informed by our individual journeys as artist--scientist and sonic artist, our collaborative practice bridges research, artistic experimentation, and community engagement. Over the past year, we have initiated projects such as the Asian Diaspora Reading Group, co- organized the Asian Empowerment Unconference, and co-created a deep listening and collective chanting activation performance as part of the Sommerakademie Paul Klee public programme.
Research Residency supported by Prohelvetia China in Taiwan.
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Our research over a month together exploring topics around grief, ancestral rituals around everyday practices and the relationality of encounters. Presenting how our collaborative processes expands and evolves from a performance towards a research-informed sharing.
As a duo-collective, we are driven by a shared commitment to uncovering and amplifying Asian diaspora stories in Switzerland. Together, we create spaces for collective connection and empowerment through sound, performance, storytelling, and community-building. Our work blends transdisciplinary practices, including somatic movements, sound art, and collaborative methodologies, to foster dialogue, belonging, and resilience. Informed by our individual journeys as artist--scientist and sonic artist, our collaborative practice bridges research, artistic experimentation, and community engagement. Over the past year, we have initiated projects such as the Asian Diaspora Reading Group, co- organized the Asian Empowerment Unconference, and co-created a deep listening and collective chanting activation performance as part of the Sommerakademie Paul Klee public programme.
Research Residency supported by Prohelvetia China in Taiwan.
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The Wheel of Consent (WOC) is a framework created by Betty Martin that explores the art of giving and receiving. It helps people understand consent through two simple questions: Who is doing it? and Who is it for? The model identifies four dynamics: Giving, Receiving, Taking, and Allowing. WOC is used in workshops, coaching, therapy, and relationship education to build clearer communication and boundaries. It encourages people to notice their desires, limits, and agreements more consciously. At its core, the Wheel of Consent teaches that consent is an ongoing, embodied conversation.
Errna (she/they) is a Malaysia-born, Zurich-based transdisciplinary researcher, facilitator, and community builder working across neurodiversity, consent, technology, and social impact. Her background spans research and academic collaborations at University of Zurich and Inselspital, as well as leadership roles including Director at FairSay. She is also co-founder of the Asian Futures Collective, creating spaces for dialogue around identity, futures, and belonging. Her work integrates trauma-informed practice, embodiment, emerging technologies, and community care through workshops and collaborative projects. Alongside her professional practice, she is a mother, dog companion, and musician who enjoys playing drums and piano in her free time.
\"},\"id\":\"c8ca5f26-fa19-4fd5-aaf7-8cd88e4e5027\",\"isHidden\":false,\"type\":\"text\"}]","link_label":null,"link_url":null,"blocks":[{"type":"text","content":{"anchor":"","anchorlabel":"","size":"regular","alignment":"left","text":"Duration: 60–90 min
The Wheel of Consent (WOC) is a framework created by Betty Martin that explores the art of giving and receiving. It helps people understand consent through two simple questions: Who is doing it? and Who is it for? The model identifies four dynamics: Giving, Receiving, Taking, and Allowing. WOC is used in workshops, coaching, therapy, and relationship education to build clearer communication and boundaries. It encourages people to notice their desires, limits, and agreements more consciously. At its core, the Wheel of Consent teaches that consent is an ongoing, embodied conversation.
Errna (she/they) is a Malaysia-born, Zurich-based transdisciplinary researcher, facilitator, and community builder working across neurodiversity, consent, technology, and social impact. Her background spans research and academic collaborations at University of Zurich and Inselspital, as well as leadership roles including Director at FairSay. She is also co-founder of the Asian Futures Collective, creating spaces for dialogue around identity, futures, and belonging. Her work integrates trauma-informed practice, embodiment, emerging technologies, and community care through workshops and collaborative projects. Alongside her professional practice, she is a mother, dog companion, and musician who enjoys playing drums and piano in her free time.
"},"settings":[],"id":"c8ca5f26-fa19-4fd5-aaf7-8cd88e4e5027","anchor":"","anchorlabel":""}]},"settings":[],"id":"1fefeba7-0718-4d7b-b4d4-a9956c1ef004","anchor":null,"anchorlabel":null},{"type":"dropdown","content":{"title":"5:30 pm—6:15 pm | Kate Lim (she/her) & Thi My Lien Nguyen (she/her) – Fruit - A Listening Ritual","maincontent":"[{\"content\":{\"anchor\":\"\",\"anchorlabel\":\"\",\"size\":\"regular\",\"alignment\":\"left\",\"text\":\"Duration: 45 min
To live between cultures is to know that every ordinary gesture carries another world inside it. This work gathers at that intersection — where ceremony meets habit, where ritual surfaces in the everyday, where memory lives not in images but in the body, in sound, in the unremarkable acts we perform without knowing why. Fruit is an honoring ritual to hold space for all the conversations and gestures held in silence and quiet acts of love.Through movement and sound, composed layers and field recordings drawn from distant places, bodies become sites of memory.
Kate Lim is a sound artist based in Zurich of Swiss/Thai origins, whose practice establishes listening as a thinking and meditative discipline. Her work engages with listening as both a political act and a fundamental state of being — one through which the body becomes a resonant particle: a site of understanding, self-awareness, and felt experience. Using sound as a tool to make liminal spaces audible, her work dwells in what is neither fully one nor the other — opening reflection on belonging, multiplicity, and the ways sound mediates between self and world.
Thi My Lien Nguyen is an artist and photographer of Vietnamese descent. Her multidisciplinary practice engages memory, materiality and the poetics of diaspora through photography, printmaking, performance, writing and culinary activations. Food functions as both medium and inquiry – a space to negotiate belonging and collective memory. Working with analog and alternative photographic processes, she proposes slowness and embodied practice as forms of resistance. Her work draws on traditions and rituals to tell stories that resist linear time.
\"},\"id\":\"7c504dbc-301f-4036-828c-534d5cc8805b\",\"isHidden\":false,\"type\":\"text\"}]","link_label":null,"link_url":null,"blocks":[{"type":"text","content":{"anchor":"","anchorlabel":"","size":"regular","alignment":"left","text":"Duration: 45 min
To live between cultures is to know that every ordinary gesture carries another world inside it. This work gathers at that intersection — where ceremony meets habit, where ritual surfaces in the everyday, where memory lives not in images but in the body, in sound, in the unremarkable acts we perform without knowing why. Fruit is an honoring ritual to hold space for all the conversations and gestures held in silence and quiet acts of love.Through movement and sound, composed layers and field recordings drawn from distant places, bodies become sites of memory.
Kate Lim is a sound artist based in Zurich of Swiss/Thai origins, whose practice establishes listening as a thinking and meditative discipline. Her work engages with listening as both a political act and a fundamental state of being — one through which the body becomes a resonant particle: a site of understanding, self-awareness, and felt experience. Using sound as a tool to make liminal spaces audible, her work dwells in what is neither fully one nor the other — opening reflection on belonging, multiplicity, and the ways sound mediates between self and world.
Thi My Lien Nguyen is an artist and photographer of Vietnamese descent. Her multidisciplinary practice engages memory, materiality and the poetics of diaspora through photography, printmaking, performance, writing and culinary activations. Food functions as both medium and inquiry – a space to negotiate belonging and collective memory. Working with analog and alternative photographic processes, she proposes slowness and embodied practice as forms of resistance. Her work draws on traditions and rituals to tell stories that resist linear time.
"},"settings":[],"id":"7c504dbc-301f-4036-828c-534d5cc8805b","anchor":"","anchorlabel":""}]},"settings":[],"id":"70aba8af-5ec0-4798-9bef-4dc9f89c2f8a","anchor":null,"anchorlabel":null},{"type":"dropdown","content":{"title":"6:25 pm—6:40 pm | Vanessa Bosch – My Temple is a Monstrous Body ","maincontent":"[{\"content\":{\"anchor\":\"\",\"anchorlabel\":\"\",\"size\":\"regular\",\"alignment\":\"left\",\"text\":\"Screening
VO thai, Sub. English
Duration: 15min
My Temple is a Monstrous Body is an experimental film exploring renewable energy infrastructures through animist cosmologies and spirit beliefs. Moving through a hydropower plant as a ritual site, the camera follows the perspective of an unseen “eternal ghost”, the hydro-energy itself. Through field recordings and fragmented testimonies, the work reflects on technology, rituals, possession, landscape, and the shifting relationship between industrial and invisible forces.
Vanessa Bosch (Vanny/she/none, *1995) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Zurich working across video, sound, sculptural installations and performative activations. Influenced by video game culture, science fiction, and magical realism, her practice explores socio-ecological and spiritual-technological narratives through hydrofeminist, decolonial, and queer-feminist perspectives. She is co-operator of the music label 76666, host of the online radio show No Bad Breath Days on radio80k, and co-founder of the Asian Futures Collective. Vanny works as a Teaching Assistant in the Master Major Art:ificial Studies at ZHdK.
\"},\"id\":\"126ba91a-735d-4e71-8780-6b95aa2e9c86\",\"isHidden\":false,\"type\":\"text\"}]","link_label":null,"link_url":null,"blocks":[{"type":"text","content":{"anchor":"","anchorlabel":"","size":"regular","alignment":"left","text":"Screening
VO thai, Sub. English
Duration: 15min
My Temple is a Monstrous Body is an experimental film exploring renewable energy infrastructures through animist cosmologies and spirit beliefs. Moving through a hydropower plant as a ritual site, the camera follows the perspective of an unseen “eternal ghost”, the hydro-energy itself. Through field recordings and fragmented testimonies, the work reflects on technology, rituals, possession, landscape, and the shifting relationship between industrial and invisible forces.
Vanessa Bosch (Vanny/she/none, *1995) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Zurich working across video, sound, sculptural installations and performative activations. Influenced by video game culture, science fiction, and magical realism, her practice explores socio-ecological and spiritual-technological narratives through hydrofeminist, decolonial, and queer-feminist perspectives. She is co-operator of the music label 76666, host of the online radio show No Bad Breath Days on radio80k, and co-founder of the Asian Futures Collective. Vanny works as a Teaching Assistant in the Master Major Art:ificial Studies at ZHdK.
"},"settings":[],"id":"126ba91a-735d-4e71-8780-6b95aa2e9c86","anchor":"","anchorlabel":""}]},"settings":[],"id":"ebb23b86-816a-4e3f-bd11-5599777cb880","anchor":null,"anchorlabel":null},{"type":"dropdown","content":{"title":"7:30 pm | Bo Wang & Pan Lu – Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings","maincontent":"[{\"content\":{\"anchor\":\"\",\"anchorlabel\":\"\",\"size\":\"regular\",\"alignment\":\"left\",\"text\":\"Screening
2017, 28 min
Proposed by Nakita Lameiras Ah-Kite
Screening
2017, 28 min
Proposed by Nakita Lameiras Ah-Kite