Community Engagement Exhibition
Gray Area
San Francisco, CA
2025


Clay + 3D scanning workshop, ICE Protection workshop, live performance, and exhibition

As a result of the billions of dollars spent on surveillance technology for the United States Immigration under the Trump administration, there has been an increase in mass deportations. Tensions are high as raids continue to escalate both in the Bay Area and around the country. Macro Waves explains: "As we focus our attention on the ways that ICE uses technology to detain, deport, and surveil, we must continue to uplift each other as a form of resistance."

In response, Home Without Borders is a collaborative community art project that encourages intersectional resistance. By celebrating immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers through shared stories, performance, and workshops, this project pays tribute to the resilience of immigrant communities and their contributions to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Commissioned by SF Arts Commission as part of the city-wide Shaping Legacy initiative in partnership with Gray Area, this exhibit brought a new hybrid physical/digital monument to life through the direct creative contributions of community members. 

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Workshops:

Sunday, August 3, 1 – 4 PM

Clay-making and 3D scanning workshop guided by visual artist Victor Saucedo. Participants will create their own monuments and memorials that will be scanned, uploaded, and then placed into a virtual environment.

Thursday, August 14

• 4 – 6 PM: Digital Security & ICE Protection Workshop

In response to state surveillance and deportation raids in California, we partnered with Turner Willman of 18 Million Rising to lead digital safety workshops for frontline communities, offering practical tools for resisting ICE monitoring. Initiatives like this advance socially engaged art by transforming pedagogy into practice—empowering marginalized groups and activating creative resistance.

7 PM: Performance by Truc Nguyen, a Vietnamese queer artist, who performed an audiovisual piece of an intergenerational story, blending a refugee's past with their child’s first time visiting their motherland.

Additional Links
(Gray Area)

Macro Waves (Robin Birdd David & Jeffrey Yip) utilizes the framework of archiving to make sense of the intergenerational stories of movement and transition held in the objects we inherit–whether the things passed down directly by immigrant elders or our collective responsibility to contend with the growing mass of consumer waste.

Who is responsible for your things after you’re gone? And how do we honor and contend with the belongings of previous generations–especially when they’ve felt the need to hold onto everything as a means of survival? Macro Waves embraces the spirit of collection, reuse, and repair passed down to them as they seek out the memories and sentimentality of the objects they’ve gathered from the Public Reuse and Recycling Area. Along with cataloging a growing repository of 3D scans they’ve made of their accumulated objects, the artists interviewed San Francisco residents about their experiences managing the stuff they’ve had to sift through from their elders and how this has shaped the interviewees’ relationships to their own belongings.

Throughout the exhibition, e-waste generations too boxy and out of date–signal boosters, an AM radio, stacks of video screens–have been resuscitated to transmit and display the gathered interviews and digital archive of objects. This presentation of inherited objects and current day stories plays with our sense of time: talking backwards to earlier generations and our younger selves, as well as into the future. The crackly grain to this obsolete technology is a feature, not a bug. This is not seamless, high def precision. The artifacts that emerge from this passage of information from one generation to another–people and technology–gives each iteration its own sensibility.

This generative refiguration also manifests in other sculptural pieces, where materials like rice bags, recycled plastic takeaway containers, and colorful reusable shopping bags are remixed into sails for model boats, a lamp stand, or the backing of a folding chair. New artistic gestures live alongside and within found objects, infused with care and inherited knowledge.

Collective Futures

Edge on the Square
SF, Chinatown, CA
Multi-Sensory Installation + workshop series
Collective Space
12 ft x 12 ft
2023

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“Self-care,” a terminology turned lifestyle that became increasingly more popular during the start of the pandemic, has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Co-opted by big corporate media for profit, many of us find ourselves in search of care, only to be fed algorithmic advertisements for subscription meditation apps, AI therapists, and social media influencers promoting corporate wellness programs. But how did the term self-care make its way into American culture? The term self-care was integrated into medical ethics teachings in the 1950s by primarily western psychiatric hospitals for institutionalized patients and was later expanded upon by the Black Panther Party during the Civil Rights Movement, with a focus on community care. The Black Panthers understood the critical role that community care played for the rights of Black and marginalized communities, seen through the many resources they organized, including free medical care, food security, childcare, and elderly safety programs. Today, through late-stage capitalism, self-care has transformed into a commodity that is consumed for profit and further perpetuates productivity culture. 


In response to our collective experiences navigating the ongoing global pandemic, Macro Waves reimagines a future that centers healing through community care.  As we have re-emerged from shelter-in-place, back to the hustle of in-person life, how do we pause and re-gather what we have collectively experienced? The notion of collective care has been practiced by non-Western communities for generations before self-care found its way into American culture. How can we become critical of the rhetoric around care when it is being used for profit? While caring for the self is fundamental to our collective well-being, when does the term self-care cause more harm than good?


Macro Waves dives deeper into the practice of care through, Collective Futures, a multimedia art experience and collective space that focuses on the act of re-gathering, the point of re-entry, and the process of collective transformation. Through a multi-sensory installation and a series of collaborative healing-based workshops and performances, this project challenges our perceptions of individual experiences and transforms them into a shared process. Collective Futures invites viewers to re-gather through a multimedia-based interactive installation that utilizes haptic vibrational technology, known to invoke relaxation and alleviate stress. Visitors are welcome to collectively pause by sitting, laying, sharing, and interacting with the vibrating tactile installation while listening to accompanying audio that synchronizes with each vibration. The vibrations offer a holistic experience uniting the senses of touch, sight, and sound. By cultivating a collaborative culture of exploration, inquiry, and play within the healing process, this multimedia art experience will also act as a workshop space for collaborators to facilitate alternative healing modalities focused on sound, breathwork, meditation, and intergenerational wellness practices.

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Free Public Programs:

• Live sound performance by Cone Shape Top and champoy
• Music performance by Harriet Brown
• Tai chi workshop and sound bath with Chinatown elders, by Alex Medel and Jeffrey Yip.
  

Additional Links
https://www.edgeonthesquare.org/within-others/macro-waves

Flora 5000

SFMOMA Soapbox Derby McLaren Park, San Francisco, CA
2022

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Flora 5000 is an inflatable vehicle from a post-apocalyptic future when planet earth is no longer habitable for plant life due to global warming. Macro Waves, a team of mad botanists, travels back to earth in the Flora 5000 on a mission to repopulate the planet with plant life. Flora 5000 serves as a traveling greenhouse preservation robot, scaling the globe, conserving plant species and seed life, and aiding in the earth's reforestation.

SFMOMA’s Soapbox Derby returned to McLaren Park for the first time in more than 40 years! The original artists’ derbies from the 1970s are legendary events in our history. Between the two races in 1975 and 1978, the museum commissioned cars and trophies from more than 200 artists — including Ruth Asawa, Robert Arneson, Ant Farm, Viola Frey, Mike Henderson, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Richard Shaw, and Carlos Villa — and thousands gathered to watch the races unfold.

Additional Link:
SFMOMA’s Soapbox Derby