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<\/a>Woo says that Culture Days offers an opportunity for attendees and coordinators to engage and grow in the community through the programs offered.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt creates a new vocabulary for yourself, not only intercultural, but intracultural communication, because you\u2019re working with a lot of different artists from different backgrounds, lived experiences, shared experiences. So, you benefit a lot from that, and also building kinships, building community resilience, and also visibility,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s important to have visibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year, Woo has organized a patchwork poetry workshop exploring intercultural themes and personal ancestry.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe benefit of attending is experiencing different workshops. For an example, my workshop is poetry, so, learning how to write urban poetry, and I have been taught by the poet laureate winner from Victoria, [which] is very beneficial because I have knowledge skills sharing that to how to write poetry,\u201d says Woo. \u201cIt\u2019s a specific poetry which is called cento, which is Latin for \u2018patchwork poetry.\u2019 So it\u2019s a specialized poetry to do. It\u2019s collage. So you take two, three lines from different poets, and then you put them together. Then after that, it becomes a cohesive poem with your poem.\u201d<\/p>\n
As part of the event\u2019s ambassador series, attendees can engage in intercultural interplay, exploring myriad creative commonalities existing across cultures. She says that poetry from around the world can be combined and joined for her program.<\/p>\n
\u201cPoetry is very powerful. All the stuff that I used, the poems, they\u2019re all translated from different languages into English. So that\u2019s the cross-cultural intercultural play with that to this project. It\u2019s all picked from different Indigenous languages, I\u2019ve got some from French, I got some that are German, I have some that are Japanese, Taiwanese. I have some that are translated from other parts of the world. And then everyone has to remix them into their own poem,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd then they can create a visual art piece afterwards, like a collage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Culture Days\u2019 mission is to foster, promote, and affirm cultural and artistic expression; Woo says these values help uplift marginalized communities and BIPOC, disabled, and queer artists. She says BC Culture Days has provided a platform to encourage awareness among artists such as herself and the intergenerational BIPOC arts collective she founded, Meltshot Brownie.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese values\u2026 They allow me to have the creative freedom to create a wonderful program for participants,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re very flexible to work with, and they\u2019re amazing to work with\u2026 And it concretizes me as well, as an artist, just to be taken seriously, to see myself out there is nice\u2026 I believe artistic expression can leverage your voice, making you from a small person, small voice, to a bigger voice. And also learning this skill and using this platform to relieve any distress or emotional distress, because that\u2019s what poetry is… Artistic expression is also for that as well.\u201d<\/p>\n