Accented Projects

Thank you for walking with us this year, and for believing in When They Have Their Own Historians. The ideas and energies from this work are already unfolding into what comes next. We are entering the new year with excitement and a deep sense to keep building spaces where memory stays alive and collective imagination can breathe. Here’s to renewal and new portals opening in the year ahead — When They Have Their Own Historians Shadows, Archives & the Afterlife of Memory A Public Ritual Conceived and Directed by Fei Li @_fei.li_ Co-Directed by Gayle Fekete @modanpro Composed by Jacqueline Coston @jacq__jypsy Performers / Co-Creators Aika Takeshima @aikatakeshima , Djassi DaCosta Johnson @djauniversal , Jeevika Bhat @jeevika.bhat , Katreen Toukhy @kathoray , Mame Diarra Speis-Biaye @saspeis , Shizu Homma @shizu_homma , YAKIKAT @yaki.kat Production Support Team: Sasha Thliha, Athos Cakiades Cinematographers David Dominguez @david.dominguezzz Ryan Cavataro @cavataro

Thank you to the Brooklyn Arts Council for your generous support of our project! Your belief in our vision means so much and empowers us to bring our work to life. rePosted • @bkartscouncil With heartfelt gratitude, we’re thrilled to announce we’ve reached our end-of-year fundraising goal! Your voice, generosity, and belief in the arts made this possible, and we couldn’t be more thankful 💙 This year’s theme, Brooklyn Reimagined: Dream, Experiment, Transform, inspired us to dream big, support bold experimentation, and create transformative opportunities for our community. Your support helps to bring these ideals to life, ensuring Brooklyn’s artists and cultural programs continue to thrive 🦋 As our communities continue to face difficulties, your contribution represents hope, resilience, and a shared commitment to uplifting Brooklyn’s artistic voices 🫂   As we close this chapter, we’re excited to continue to connect, collaborate, and support creativity in Brooklyn 💌 Thank you for being an essential part of this journey—the future of Brooklyn’s arts community is brighter because of you!  Image: Tales from the Table presented by Fei Li | @accented_projects , 2024 BAC Grantee. Photo: Fei Li.  #brooklyn #brooklynartscouncil #brooklynartist #artsnonprofit #grants #funding #artscommunity #artistopportunities

Still in the Riverdrunk hangover! Our performance last Saturday was such a great point of departure for our long journey. We will continue to tell each other stories, continue to seek water, continue to create self sustained female worlds. - Riverdrunk, Womanwild [Cracking the Surface—Water as Method] •A testimony of art, words, dance and music  •Form: Fei Li Words: Aurvi Sharma Movement: Lauren Hlubny Taylor Ennen Sound: Simona D . . . . #installationart #multidisciplinary #contemporaryart #contemporarydance #contemporarymusic #performance #nonfiction #lyricvideos #writers #multimedia #performanceart

vol 3 is coming Jun 2, 8-10 pm 17 MacDougal St, Brooklyn RSVP link in bio ✨✨✨ belonging is bodily felt. diasporicity is something at work in every gesture and movement of diasporic being. but bed-stuy is not a stable backdrop against which newcomers arrive and settle. it is itself a place under pressure — long-rooted black life facing displacement, rents climbing, blocks changing, the violence of being made mobile in the place you already belong to. to imagine localization here only as my emplacement would be to repeat the very logic that unsettles this neighborhood. so mahjong and dominoes meet on different terms. both are bodily practices that carry diasporic histories, materializing the social, cultural, political, economic, and affective processes by which people hold place against forces that would move them. the table becomes a small site of solidarity. because we are each, in our own way, practicing presence. practicing relation under unequal conditions. a grammar is forming between us. horizontal, unfinished. i’m grateful. see you in vol.3 (some of the photos in this flyer were taken by @najamakeda )

See you tonight ✶ We return to uncle chin’s lounge for another evening of mahjong, dominoes (by od @od.as.is ), gathering, conversation, and neighborhood connection. Free rsvp. If you’re able, please support our beloved Nigerian uncle’s business by buying a drink at the bar. And if finances are difficult right now, please don’t let that stop you from coming. just let us know. community should remain accessible to everyone. 8–10pm 17 MacDougal St, Brooklyn All are welcome.

we are back next Tuesday! rsvp link in bio some reflections: i’m thinking mahjong as a body that travels: a body of rhythm, touch, speech, etiquette, memory, and relation that becomes local again only by attaching itself to a specific place and its people. i imagine mahjong in bed-stuy as a sinophone practice that is unfinished until it becomes localized through new relations. in shu mei shih’s discussion of comparative minority studies, she argues that sinophone studies can foreground “the horizontal axes of minority-to-minority relationality” rather than only the classic majority/minority binary. this matters because my question is not about how mahjong assimilates into dominant white america. it is about what happens when a sinophone practice is localized in relation to historically black neighborhood life. shih gives conceptual language for precisely that move. the question becomes: what does a minority cultural form become when it is no longer organized primarily by china-versus-america, but by a horizontal encounter between racialized communities living a shared locality under unequal conditions?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

How can we remember love while the world burns and reforms? Smuggling Back Through Play: Nostalgia, Capital, and the Postcolonial Stage When They Have Their Own Historians Series Conceived and Directed by Fei Li @_fei.li_ Co-Directed by Gayle Fekete @modanpro Composed by Jacqueline Coston @jacq__jypsy Performers / Co-Creators Aika Takeshima @aikatakeshima , Djassi DaCosta Johnson @djauniversal , Jeevika Bhat @jeevika.bhat , Katreen Toukhy @kathoray , Mame Diarra Speis-Biaye @saspeis , Shizu Homma @shizu_homma , YAKIKAT @yaki.kat Production Support Team: Sasha Thliha, Athos Cakiades Cinematographers David Dominguez @david.dominguezzz Ryan Cavataro @cavataro

Play is often regarded as a training ground for social roles. Children’s play also carries a memory of other possibilities, such as living alongside animals, speaking to invisible companions, and blurring the self and others. In the early mythic strata of culture, humans did not regard themselves as separate from animals; stories of geese, cats, birds, and cows were part of everyday ontology. Children’s games rehearse this porousness. Re-staging them as art is to recall a time when the boundaries of species, gender, and hierarchy were less fixed. By reexploring nostalgia, our ritual emphasizes how longing doesn’t always orient toward the past but often toward a reimagined future. Nostalgia is movement: a smuggling route back into the present, carrying fragments of ritual hidden inside the pockets of memory. Smuggling Back Through Play: Nostalgia, Capital, and the Postcolonial Stage When They Have Their Own Historians Series Conceived and Directed by Fei Li @_fei.li_ Co-Directed by Gayle Fekete @modanpro Composed by Jacqueline Coston @jacq__jypsy Performers / Co-Creators Aika Takeshima @aikatakeshima , Djassi DaCosta Johnson @djauniversal , Jeevika Bhat @jeevika.bhat , Katreen Toukhy @kathoray , Mame Diarra Speis-Biaye @saspeis , Shizu Homma @shizu_homma , YAKIKAT @yaki.kat Production Support Team: Sasha Thliha, Athos Cakiades Cinematographers David Dominguez @david.dominguezzz Ryan Cavataro @cavataro

#givingtuesday Dear Community, as we close the final chapter of When They Have Their Own Historians, we’re looking back at three years of shared portals: performances shaped by ancestral memory, poetry and story nights held in nail salons, public rituals in galleries and community centers, reading circles, workshops, and all the small luminous gestures that became possible because our communities kept showing up. Now, as we gather these memories, we’re also preparing for what comes next. The work continues, and grows. The ideas seeded through Historians are unfolding into new projects launching in 2026: movement laboratories, reading groups, community events, workshops, artist books, and performance-installations that imagine solidarity as living knowledge. These new offerings come directly from the wisdom shared with us: dancers, elders, cultural workers, poets, nail technicians, scholars, musicians,children of immigrants. They taught us that art becomes most powerful when it circulates through many hands. This Giving Tuesday, we’re asking for your support. Our Project is an artist-led with NYFA fiscal sponsorship, which means your donations are fully tax-deductible. Every contribution supports BIPOC and immigrant artists, fair honoraria, accessible community workshops, and the creation of new performance worlds grounded in care and imagination. Together, let’s keep expanding what our communities can imagine, build, and remember. Donate via the link in our bio. With gratitude and solidarity,

For diasporic bodies, for those shaped by migration, colonial interruption, or fragmented inheritance, the journey is rarely a straight line, but that does not make it a loss. In Yakikat’s logic, the traveler who is stopped, redirected, or forced to start again, accumulates a story. Our performance is a rehearsal for how a life under power moves, pauses, and moves again, and how the one who keeps walking, even through interruption, becomes historian of their own becoming. When They Have Their Own Historians Shadows, Archives & the Afterlife of Memory A Performance by Accented Projects Conceived and Directed by Fei Li @_fei.li_ Co-Directed by Gayle Fekete @modanpro Composed by Jacqueline Coston @jacq__jypsy Performers / Co-Creators Aika Takeshima @aikatakeshima , Djassi DaCosta Johnson @djauniversal , Jeevika Bhat @jeevika.bhat , Katreen Toukhy @kathoray , Mame Diarra Speis-Biaye @saspeis , Shizu Homma @shizu_homma , YAKIKAT @yaki.kat Production Support Team: Sasha Thliha, Athos Cakiades Cinematographers David Dominguez Ryan Cavataro … WHEN THEY HAVE THEIR OWN HISTORIANS made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and is fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts @nyfacurrent

rePosted • @_fei.li_ i’m still carrying the air from our performance night. When They Have Their Own Historians was never meant to end in applause. it was meant to live in the small acts of remembering we continue to share. this project began as a question about history. but through this process, i started to understand that remembrance is never singular. it’s something we build through touch, rhythm, care. working with this extraordinary constellation of artists, has been an act of faith. together, we created an ecology of listening and laughter. a rehearsal for how to move differently in the world. heartfelt thanks to the incredible production support team for holding us with such care and devotion; to our cinematographers for capturing this fleeting world; and to gymnopedie space for sheltering it. tremendous gratitude to the new york state council on the arts (nysca) grant, nyfa fiscal sponsorship @nyfacurrent , and materials for the arts @materialsforthearts for making this project possible. and to everyone who came: thank you for being part of this moment. @jacq__jypsy @aikatakeshima @djauniversal @jeevika.bhat @saspeis @kathoray @shizu_homma @yaki.kat @_fei.li_ @modanpro what I carry most from this process is the relationships that made it alive. With love, exhaustion, and deep gratitude, ***** WHEN THEY HAVE THEIR OWN HISTORIANS made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and is fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts

Last night, When They Have Their Own Historians came alive, a constellation of breath and memory shared among so many generous hearts. This moment, the Oya section, embodies the storm of transformation, where care moves like thunder through the body. We extend our deepest gratitude to all who came, witnessed, and held the space with us. And to our extraordinary collaborators and community: thank you for your brilliance, your rigor, and your faith in this shared experiment of remembering. @jacq__jypsy @aikatakeshima @djauniversal @jeevika.bhat @saspeis @kathoray @shizu_homma @yaki.kat @_fei.li_ @modanpro @goodup_sasha @helloathos