Secret, No More - An Expression of Humanity
“Secret, No More - An Expression of Humanity” is a photographic, illustrative, and poetic exhibition that aims to humanize the journey of people affected by the Secret War in Laos. It will also focus on how current day Lao Americans express this legacy via art and storytelling. The project is inclusive of all ethnicities of people of Laos who fled as refugees or are directly linked to the diaspora. The goal is to bridge the generational, cultural, and artistic gaps that are currently present within the Laotian community. This refugee diaspora has been hidden and silenced for decades. Because of the Secret War, Laos holds the title for the most bombed country per capita ever in world history.
Krysada Phounsiri
Krysada Phounsiri is a Lao American professional dancer, award winning poet, engineer, and photographer from San Diego, CA. He is a Physics & Astrophysics double major, with a minor in Creative Writing from UC Berkeley. He published his debut poetry book, "Dance Among Elephants", and 2nd poetry book, "Every Passing Minute", under Sahtu Press. Krysada is currently a Senior Optical Engineer working in the BioTech industry. His dance resume includes various competition wins around the globe, performing in Jabbawockeez MUS.I.C show in Las Vegas, dancing on movie sets, and other creative projects. Many of his creative endeavors are connected to exploring Lao / Southeast Asian American identity and how it can be integrated in various spaces.
Photography: Website / @snappilots
Sahtu Press: sahtu.press
Critical Refugee Studies Collective
Funded by the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), the Critical Refugee Studies Collective is a four-year initiative (2017–2020) that seeks to make the University of California system the premier intellectual space and resource for critical research, teaching, and public initiatives that privilege and address the concerns, perspectives, knowledge production and global imaginings of refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced and stateless human beings.
Spectacular, supranational, hyper-focus on refugee suffering, desperation and neediness in media and international relations, and legal and social science scholarship have all represented refugees as passive recipients of western generosity and increasingly as the targets of racial profiling, surveillance and detention today. This has created a multi-billion dollar professionalized field for rescue recreation, and precluded any critical examination of the global geopolitical-historical conditions that create and sustain the refugee “crisis.” In contrast to the problem-oriented approach to refugees, the Collective charts an interdisciplinary field of Critical Refugee Studies (CRS), a humane and ethical site of inquiry that re-conceptualizes refugee lifeworlds not as a problem to be solved by global elites but as a site of social, political and historical critiques that, when carefully traced, make transparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement. Such reconceptualization requires approaches that integrate theoretical rigor and policy concerns with refugees’ rich and complicated lived worlds — approaches that fuse the critical and the creative.