Interview with SOUPSPOON Collective – WORM X Amarte 2025

Get to know SOUPSPOON, the collective behind the workshop series SOFT TISSUE.

SOUPSPOON, comprising Maoyi Qiu, Dakota Guo, Avita Maheen, and Augustina Cai, cultivates a common, Asian-contextualized space for the particular that eludes translation.

Their workshop series SOFT TISSUE explores how embodied practices can unsettle diagnosis and open new ways of sensing and being together, approaching health as shifting relations of body, memory, environment, and society rather than as a fixed condition to be restored.

Their workshops take place on the 9th, 16th, and 23rd of November.
Sign up (free admission) and find more information available here.

HOW DID YOUR COLLECTIVE COME TOGETHER?

DAKOTA GUO: SOUPSPOON was born out of friendship and shared needs in 2022. At the time, all the founding members — Raffia, Maoyi, Miyoung, Pitchaya, and myself — were alumni of the Dutch Art Institute (DAI), based in Rotterdam and originally from different parts of Asia. During the lockdown, we felt an urgency to build a community that could hold the complexities within each of our practices. We also wanted to meet others with similar backgrounds and concerns — to not feel lost in this country and its cultural sector, where our practices were often fragmented or misinterpreted, if not tokenized.

So we began gathering regularly, sharing our works and exchanging feedback. Our first project, Dialectic of Arrival, was hosted by the Goethe-Institut and became the occasion to give form to this initiation. Since then, our efforts have taken various forms, from facilitating events and workshops, to embodied research and publishing, actively collaborating with artists, cultural workers, spaces and institutions across and beyond Rotterdam and the Netherlands. Avita and Augustina joined us last year during our collaborative project on collective-making with TENT and Reading Room Rotterdam.

MAOYI QIU: I think it’s pretty much covered, but I think it’s also maybe born out of the necessity of exploring what collectivity means when we are both friends and also cultural workers that may be facing a similar kind of situation in the West.

DO YOU FEEL LIKE FRIENDSHIP AND BEING IN A COLLECTIVE WERE VITAL TO YOU? AS IN, FRIENDSHIP IS WHAT UNITES YOU FIRST AND FOREMOST.

DAKOTA GUO: I think friendship is what makes SOUPSPOON sustainable, and working on SOUPSPOON projects together in turn grounds that friendship. The collective has created a space where our practices and lives could intersect more naturally. Friendship shapes how we make decisions, how we hold each other accountable, and how we imagine ways of being together that feel more sustainable than working alone.

WHAT LED TO SOFT TISSUE? AND HOW DID THE IDEA FOR THIS WORKSHOP SERIES HAPPEN?

AUGUSTINA CAI: This series grew out of both our previous practices and personal interests. For example, Maoyi and I share an interest and some experience in massage. We wanted to explore how massage, beyond its clinical or practical functions, can also have metaphysical or psychological potential — as a way of connecting people. For me personally, the practice of massage has helped me understand my own body better, and how it relates to others. It’s also taught me how to relieve others’ pain more intuitively. I think this resonates with many people’s everyday experiences — how we navigate pain and care within the modern medical system, and within modern life itself. It’s also about how we, as individuals, gradually evolve through these processes.

AVITA MAHEEN: Yeah, I think, as you said, my individual practice is rooted in listening, and listening through the body and accessing memories. So we thought that this was connecting some of our individual strands. What I also wanted to say is that since we’re talking about health, it naturally leads to talking about wellness. But I think for us, this project isn’t just about deconstructing health, it’s also about questioning the Eurocentric idea of wellness, which often enters through a western gaze. We’re more interested in breaking away from that and seeing it through our own perspectives, connecting our individual knowledge around that.

YOUR WORK OFTEN CARRIES DIASPORIC SENSIBILITIES, SUCH AS NOTIONS OF DISTANCE AND BELONGING. HOW DO THOSE CONCEPTS INFLUENCE THIS PROJECT?

DAKOTA GUO: Diasporic sensibility in our work often emerges through a sense of temporality — living in discontinuity, caught between “here” and “there,” or sometimes neither. This discontinuity is not only temporal and spatial but also affective; it shapes how we perceive belonging and how we exist politically. Rather than trying to resolve it, SOUPSPOON has become a way for us to stay with this in-betweenness — to ground ourselves in the present while acknowledging the gaps and dissonances that come with it.

With SOFT TISSUE, we extend this inquiry into the language of health. We think of health not as a stable condition to be restored, but as a set of shifting relations — between bodies, environments, and social structures. Many of us, and those around us, live with ongoing distress or fatigue that has become normalized. In that sense, health is never only clinical; it is political, collective, and relational. Yet the discourse of (un)health often projects doubt and shame, enforcing ideals of wellness, normalcy, and productivity. To work against this is also a form of resistance — a quiet refusal of the demand to be well, to be consistent, to perform strength. We don’t approach this series as experts in health or care, but as people who also need it — as a way of asking what (else) we can do together, with the tools and sensitivities shaped by our own practices.

YOU APPROACH ‘HEALTH’ NOT JUST THROUGH THE BODY, BUT AS A LENS TO EXPLORE POWER, ENVIRONMENT, AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS. HOW DOES EMBODIED RESEARCH ALLOW YOU TO REFRAME HEALTH IN THIS BROADER WAY?

AUGUSTINA CAI: Health is often treated as a “good” condition of life, something naturally desirable and unquestioned. Yet in reality, it is always entangled with systems of power, from the metaphysical to the social. To understand health is, in a sense, to understand what it means to live in the modern world. As Foucault’s notion of biopower makes clear, our very definitions of health and illness are governed by institutional, political, and cultural forces. This power doesn’t come from outside. It’s not like a transcendental power, like God in the old times. It operates from within, everywhere and is hard to escape. Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, warned against the normalisation of metaphors that burden the ill with moral judgments and stereotypes. They are hiding in our language, in our everyday entanglement with our environment. That critique remains crucial, but it also raises the question: what alternatives do we have? How can we resist these institutional and cultural constraints?

For us, embodied research is one way to challenge these dominant frames. By working through our own embodied experiences, sensations, memories, gestures of touch, and deep listening, we resist the abstraction of health into a purely medical or psychological category. At the same time, we see health not just in the singular body but in the communal. The ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan, for instance, describes how in some African communities, illness is never a private issue but always a matter of collective negotiation and care. This resonates with us deeply: health as relational, something shaped between self and others, body and environment, power and resistance. Through these embodied practices, we seek to reclaim health as a living, shared condition, rather than a state to be prescribed or controlled.

Do you want to add anything?

AVITA MAHEEN: Yeah, I think often, your body has a set of knowledge that informs how you react and respond to your immediate and broader environment. And I think we’ve been sold this idea of emotions and different fragments of emotional responses as within some sort of structure or umbrella, which doesn’t really make sense, because I think culturally people are different and there is something that is a cultural emotion that a group has, which another may not have. I think it is important to explore these various sets of emotions and sensations that you feel that are culturally, socially, economically and politically informed. And we feel that through alternative ways of archiving, through embodied knowledge, we can find new paths of understanding. And that is also part of health in a broader sense of the word. Health and body are these big vessels where much of our knowledge is stored, and the network is so big and many interconnected strands are detached in our understanding, we have to start somewhere.

IN YOUR PRACTICE, THE BODY OFTEN BECOMES AN ARCHIVE OR EVEN A SCORE. LIKE YOUR 24-HOUR PROJECT (“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity”). HOW DO YOU WORK WITH THE BODY AS BOTH A SITE OF MEMORY AND OF TRANSFORMATION?

AVITA MAHEEN: I think small rituals.

DAKOTA GUO: When I work alone, I tend to forget that I even have a body…ideas stay abstract inside the mind. But when we work collectively, the body inevitably comes forward. It’s no longer just the medium but the condition that holds us together. In projects like the 24-hour takeover, what stayed with me wasn’t the schedule or structure, but how many bodies shared the same space and time — how that physical presence created memories and relations that outlasted the event itself.

In Performing (Pre-)Scription, this awareness becomes more deliberate. The body is usually where power is exercised — it receives instructions, follows routines, performs compliance. We’re interested in what happens when that dynamic shifts. In this workshop, prescriptions are written without diagnosis, and participants choose what speaks to them. When performed, the body doesn’t just carry out the text; it reinterprets and alters it. The act of performance becomes a negotiation, where both the body and the prescription are transformed. That’s how we see the body — not as a fixed site of memory, but as something that continuously rewrites what it carries.

AUGUSTINA CAI: What you said made me think that maybe we all share a similar feeling based on our educational background. We all read a lot and think a lot, right? And up to a point, we feel “Okay, that’s enough.” All that thinking doesn’t necessarily change anything. We begin to feel the need for transformative, embodied experiences and practices, things that can actually move us forward, help us feel alive, and make us healthier.

AVITA MAHEEN: Also external knowledge can exist for us to understand concepts, but I don’t really see collective communication or collective engagement as just collectively engaging with each other. So to explore the collective, you have to explore yourself. So exploring the collective through exploring the individual.

AUGUSTINA CAI: In that sense, this whole experience is transformative.

YOUR PROJECTS SEEM TO CONSTANTLY SHIFT FORM AND EXPERIMENT WITH NEW FORMATS. EVEN FOR THESE WORKSHOPS, WHILE THERE IS A LINK THEY EACH EXPLORE HEALTH IN DIFFERENT WAYS. WHY IS ACTIVATING THE PARTICIPANTS IN DIFFERENT WAYS IMPORTANT TO YOU?

DAKOTA GUO: Each experience is activated in different ways because the practice needs it to be in this certain format.

MAOYI QIU: Yeah, we collectively think of this series not as a whole, where you have to go through it as a coherent experience, because every entry point to think of this topic is quite unique. It’s coming from our own practice and the things we are busy with at this moment that we find coherent with the subject, but in very different entries. So that’s why we don’t think that we have to think of it as a whole experience together, but rather in a different way of looking at it. Yeah, so we don’t require participants to go to each workshop, also because people have different kinds of angles or associations to their own, or their interest in this kind of topic. It is very much related to individual body conditions and abilities.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE YOUR COLLECTIVE, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS, WILL GET OUT OF THIS PROJECT?

AVITA MAHEEN: Love and friendship. *haha*

AUGUSTINA CAI: I feel that for ourselves,the process of holding these workshops is already beneficial — it allows us, as a collective, to keep learning, unlearning, and pushing our own thinking, reflection, and practice forward. It’s also simply about spending time together. As we mentioned before, the experience itself is transformative. When our practices begin to engage with a broader audience, it will deepen our own perspectives. We learn from their vulnerabilities, from the ways they respond and share. At the same time, we hope to bring our ongoing research and previous thinking to inspire participants to reflect on their own understandings of health and diagnosis, and on how they experience their bodies in daily life.

For me personally, my connection to massage began in a clinical context. I constantly empathize and “experience” others’ pain. I felt a lot of similarities between their pains. And I’ve noticed how similar many of these experiences are. For example, a large proportion of the patients suffer from back pain. It’s a collective symptom, not just an individual one. Massage alone cannot “cure” that, but if people learn to understand their own bodies through simple gestures of self-massage, it can help them navigate everyday life with greater awareness and care.

DAKOTA GUO: I think it’s twofold. First, it’s a reminder for participants — that it’s important to take care of yourself and your friends. And second, we hope that through these different practices and approaches, we’re offering a small toolkit that people can carry forward. As I said, we’re not experts, but this project is a gesture of offering.

AMAZING, THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME!

Follow the collective on their Instagram here.

Interview by Madeleine Martin.

Visuals by Sevgi Tan.

Photographs courtesy of SOUPSPOON and Nia Konstantinova.

SOFT TISSUE is part of WORM x Amarte 2025, a residency programme in which the two organisations provide space for four collectives to develop new workshop series and advance their artistic practices.