During this session participants together with the guiding artists will explore the many ways and resources that can be used to tell a story. By understanding how place and lineage inform the stories we tell, how we can utilize our environment to support those narratives, and the many forms in which these can be shared, the group will question traditional notions of storytelling and together learn new ways of crafting stories that impact the present and future of our communities.

Week One: Megan Paulin / aadizookewinini = storyteller / June 3-7

By exploring the themes around Indigenous food sovereignty, self-governance, and our relationship to food through storytelling, we are able to track environmental changes, and at the same time participate in community building, climate change mitigation, and decolonization.

Through a series of practices that include printmaking, storytelling, and seed saving participants will take part in a series of workshops that allow them to engage in a cross-discipline, line blurring, multi-arts exploration of storytelling, food, and its connection to culture, memory, community-building, and place.

Week Two: E. Medina / Hidden World/Secret Corner: Nurturing and Expanding Creativity and Craft / June 10-14

The goal of this week is to repair and reinvigorate the relationship to our own creativity, artistry, and craft. By using field recordings, deep listening, and the sharing of knowledge, participants will undertake a set of exercises that will help introduce joy, discipline, and concentration to their artistic workflow.

Through personal and collaborative practices using sound and field recordings, the group will learn how to work and incorporate their immediate environment into their work. Participants will also have the opportunity to discuss and share their experiences with impostor syndrome, creative blocks, and how to overcome those insecurities to tell their stories.

Week Three: Gabriela Ortega / We All Have a Story to Tell, We All Have the Power to Write History/ June 17-21

During the last week of the session, participants will work with Gabriela to transform and create personal stories and find the right form that fits into their own practice, integrating what was learned in the previous workshops. By decentralizing the book as the main medium where these exist, the group will explore through writing, performance, video, and sound ways to shape and weave together narratives to tell stories from a personal perspective.

Megan Paulin (she/her) is an Indigenous artist from Turtle Island (Canada) of Mi'kmaq and Polish descent. She works as a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on community arts and intergenerational art-making with Indigenous theatre and storytelling, including sounds, movement, projections, and video, as well as large-scale sculpture and puppet making. She also works in academic research around Indigenous methodologies and decolonization in writing and the arts. She is part of an ensemble called Aanmitaagzi (which translates to he/she speaks) that hosts live performative events based on traditional and contemporary Indigenous storytelling. She acts as the lead artist for the installation component, however all members work across disciplines co-creating with Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members of all ages.

E. Medina (he/him) is a first-generation Mexican-American electronic music composer, educator, and chocolatier. His work uses a combination of field recordings, spoken word, acoustic instrumentation, and analog synthesizers. His work has been featured in various albums, book releases, literary readings, and live painting sessions. He recently performed in an improvised ensemble for the 2023 [RE]Happening Festival at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. E. is the founder of Voltage Flow, a mobile artist residency that provides participants access and education in the field of modular synthesis. He is also the Head Chocolatier for French Broad Chocolate in Asheville, NC, where he uses his creative exercises for product development, production, and management.

Gabriela Ortega (she/her) is an award-winning writer/director and actor from the Dominican Republic whose work lives within the intersection of fiction and poetry, aiming to draw cultural bridges that lead to the Caribbean through intersectionality, duality, and ancestral memory. She is a 2023 Sundance screenwriting fellow, a 2022 Sundance interdisciplinary fellow, and a 2022-2023 Academy of Motion Pictures fellow. Her short film Huella was an official selection of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is being turned into a feature film after being selected for the 2022 Sundance Producers Lab and the 2023 Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. Gabriela was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film; she won the NBC & Telemundo Best Director award at the 2022 LALIFF and “Best New Filmmaker'' at the annual NFMLA awards. Her latest film, Beautiful, FL will premiere on Disney+ in 2023, and her first film, “PAPI'' is available to stream on HBO and HBO Max.

Sessions run three weeks. In-person guided sessions with visiting artists will be held each morning (more or less 10:30 am-1:30 pm) Monday-Friday. These include, but are not limited to, writing practices, conversational practices, excursions, artist talks, studio visits, films, listening practices. Participants will have the afternoons to work on their own projects and/or respond to the daily practice. Thursday evenings we will host group events related to the workshop topics. Lunch (the main meal) will be provided Monday - Friday, as well as bread and coffee in the morning. Saturday and Sunday are open.

For those staying at or through Pocoapoco, arrival is the Sunday prior to the program and departure is the Saturday following the program.

The cost of participation in the three week program is offered on sliding scale fees as noted below.

The program fee includes daily lunch Monday - Friday as well as access to the Pocoapoco house but does not include lodging, transportation, or other personal expenses. Through funding support we are able to offer scholarship fees for all national and local participants as well as a limited number of partial scholarships for international participants. International participants who would like to be considered for a scholarship should acknowledge this on the application form.

We are happy to provide letters of support to any selected applicants who are requesting external funding to cover the costs of their participation.

The cost of the program is offered on sliding scale fees as follows:

International participants: $1200 USD

National participants (Mexican nationals living in Mexico) : $5000 MXN

Local participants (Mexican nationals living in Oaxaca) : $1000 MXN

International scholarship participants: $600 USD

A 50% non-refundable deposit is required to confirm participation.

We offer various housing options with sliding fees for program participants

For more info download the open call.

Sur o No Sur is open to participants of all fields, disciplines, locations, and ages (over 21).

For this program, we require a conversational level of English.