Tamche album art and storytelling 2021

Tamche Album (@tamchealbum) is an ongoing initiative to bring awareness of the people and culture the Tarim and Jungar basins through storytelling. In the spring of 2021 during the ongoing genocide of Ughyur Muslims, I participated in a sharing project in which artists were paired with people of the Ughyur diaspora and given personal stories as prompts for creating a new piece. The story I was given was “Grandma’s City Walls”. Here is the story:

When my grandmother reached old age, she grew fond of telling us stories about her childhood. Of these stories there’s one segment that I must have heard fifty times. The story goes something like this.
Last century in the early 1940s, my grandmother, then just six or seven years old, was locked inside the house because her mother didn’t want her to go to school. The old quarter of Kashgar City was criss-crossed with roads and houses, one house or building pressed right up against another, extending in all directions. So my grandmother was able to climb to the top attic of her home and drop easily from there into the neighbor’s courtyard. From there she followed the neighbors’ child along the top of the city wall all the way to school, where the teacher welcomed her to class.
Every time my grandmother tells this story, the details change. Yet there’s one point that remains the same, and on this point my grandmother’s memory is exceptionally clear: “At that time Kashgar had many broad, thick city walls. The children would always go atop these walls, playing games and walking, following along the wall to school, then again walking along the top of the wall back home.” Those walls as well as that house where my grandmother grew up were pulled down to the earth, flattened a few years back during the great storm known as “Old Town Renovation.”

I chose to respond to this story with a piece of assemblage art. It is made from wire, paint, cloth, and one plastic figurine.