Tracing (In)visible Silences: On creative collaboration and multimedia adaption of poem to installation and artist book with Paula Te and Edward Gunawan

Online presentation Sunday June 28, 11:00 am PDT

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Edward and Paula will share the context and process of their collaboration in Born a Problem, a project exploring the erasure of Indonesian Chinese identity through decades of state-mandated assimilation laws. They will share the historical context that led to Edward's translation and erasure poetry as a form of resistance and reclamation. They will also go through the making of the artist book itself, documenting the multiple experiments in concepts, papermaking, letterpress, screenprinting, and custom ink to get to the final state of the book.

Edward Gunawan is an Indonesian-born Chinese writer and literary translator, now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. The author of two chapbooks and recipient of Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize in Literary Translation and Multilingual Texts, Edward will make their full-length translation debut with Hendri Yulius Wijaya’s poetry collection There's No Stonewall in Atlantis (forthcoming from Circumference Books). In addition to literary work, Edward has made films—as writer/producer/director—that screened at international festivals such as Berlin and Locarno, and collaborated on multimedia art installations that were exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Gray Area.

A Creative Corps Artist Fellow (supported by California Arts Council and YBCA) and a Larry Sommers Fellow (alongside Paula Te) at Seattle Print Arts, Edward earned their MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where they received the Distinguished Graduate Achievement Award. Visit addword.com for more.

Paula Te is a multimedia designer working at the intersection of craft, learning, and community.  She fell in love with book arts after her partner snuck her into a UW Special Collections viewing with Sandra Kroupa. Her first artist book was made in collaboration with Edward Gunawan, exploring narratives of Chinese-Indonesian diaspora; she and Edward received a grant from the Larry Sommers Fellowship to complete the work in 2024-2025. A believer of bridging cross-cultural connection through sustainable community craft, she co-chairs the Digital Naturalisms Conference and is currently organizing the Gathering for Open Science Hardware 2026. Paula currently resides in Duwamish, Seattle, Washington state.  She also works at a cooperatively owned tech worker coop and teaches classes about design with electronics & digital fabrication. paulate.com