It Takes a Village

a series of works

in collaboration with Dea Karina, Ariel Orah, and Morgan Sully.

It Takes a Village is a project conceived through Jay Afrisando’s conversations with Dea Karina, Ariel Orah, and Morgan Sully.

Conceived through a proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” this collaboration simultaneously highlights individual and communal voices and considers disability from the perspectives of people of color and mixed bodily identities.

The series of artworks includes:

Tumpaksewu Waterfalls: Multimedia Interpretations of Sonic Interlinguistic Captioning by Dea Karina

Year created: 2025

Medium: videos, oil on canvas, and clay pieces

Duration: 3 minutes 18 seconds

This installation traces how a single moment in nature—a video of Tumpaksewu Waterfall in East Java—transforms through the lens of six languages and three media forms. In creating this work they asked eight friends to caption her video from which they created eight paintings. They then digitized each painting and used it as a filter in a DAW plugin. Visitors are welcome to explore the resulting tracks through the haptic device displayed on the table. The work reveals how language can disable and enable, and how we constantly recreate the meaning of nature through language, community, sound, and matter.

You are welcome to gently touch the clay objects.

TŪNA TRITUNGGAL by Ariel Orah

Year created: 2025

Medium: zine, two self-made instruments in the form of a diaper station and a mailbox (featuring mini loudspeakers, a plastic turntable, and a chained hand mannequin)

This work is a trilogy installation that addresses structural exclusion, reframing disability beyond the physical to reveal social, political, and systemic barriers. The title, drawn from the Indonesian word “tuna” (absence or loss), situates disability as shaped by governance, precarity, and institutional frameworks. In dialogue with Jay Afrisando’s accessibility research, the trilogy unfolds through “Tragen,” a sound-sculptural meditation on caregiving; “Terrorah,” a critique of surveillance, migration, and identity; and “Tūna,” a zine redefining disability as systemic disenfranchisement. Rooted in Orah’s experience as a parent, migrant, and artist of color in Germany, it interrogates belonging, labor, and inequity.

Touch Me, Hug Me by Jay Afrisando and Morgan Sully

Year created: 2025

Medium: cardboard box, paper lantern, rattan container, vinyl disc, tactile transducers, amplifiers

This work comprises shaking fidgets of everyday objects, centering touch as a form of hearing-listening. In neurodivergence, Deafness, and Deafblindness, touch serves as an intimate pathway to sensing the world. However, touch is somehow still widely treated as less important and underdiscussed, especially from diverse bodymind standpoints. In addition, touch still tends to be regarded as a prohibited activity in gallery practices, with artists nor gallerists rarely providing audiences with a modality for touch, and thus positioning sight as the superior norm of knowing and understanding. Departing from Jay’s neurodivergent experience, this work focuses on touch as an intimate and playful way of interacting with sound and the world outside our bodyminds.

Work details

Year created: 2025

Format: installations

Medium: mixed media

Cast

Prompt: Jay Afrisando

Concept and Artists: Jay Afrisando, Dea Karina, Ariel Orah, and Morgan Sully

This project was created during Jay Afrisando’s DAAD Artists-in-Berlin residency 2024-25, performed at daadgalerie, and exhibited at the In Conversation exhibition, curated by Dr. Kate Brehme.

In Conversation is supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Residence Program in Berlin, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion, and the Exhibition Fund for Communal Galleries. The Galerie im Turm is run by the municipal government of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

Showcase

In Conversation exhibition, Galerie im Turm, Berlin, DE, 4 September - 23 November 2025.