Tropic editions

Tropic Editions (TE) is a Honolulu-based publishing imprint that supports artist-driven projects imbued with a sense of place. Launched in 2018 by Marika Emi, an arts organizer, chef, and designer, TE seeks to bolster and establish connections between seemingly disparate locales and identities. With a curatorial emphasis on experimentation, social criticism, and collaboration, the press is dedicated to drawing Hawaiʻi into an existing global art discourse on tropicality, post-colonialism, and creative production.

Tropic Zine (TZ), the namesake of TE, is a print publication, digital platform, and organizing collective that facilitates critical and embodied engagement with contemporary culture in Hawaiʻi and the tropics worldwide. The emotional, social, and political narratives of the Hawaiian Islands are the foundation from which the zine’s numerous contributors build new relationships within and across tropical diasporas. TZ embraces chaos, queer modes of being, discontinuity, and hybridity. The periodical’s editorial content is a collation of essays, prose, poetry, art, photography, illustration, interviews, research and ephemera that reflect a dynamic web of relations simultaneously drawn together and repelled by experiences of place.

The first issue of TZ (2018) features Hawaiʻi as an origin point and includes editorials and collaborations by artists with immediate and associative relationships to the Hawaiian islands. TZ2 (2019) decolonizes, deconstructs, and reimagines the queer Filipinx diaspora by posing questions about what it means to identify as, and to be, a contemporary citizen in an age of movement and dispersion. Expanding on the print issue, TZ2 was also incarnated as an exhibition at Aupuni Space, an arts venue in Kakaʻako, Oʻahu, in June 2019. TZ3 (2020–21) is a response to the isolation and alienation of the current moment. Developed at Aupuni Space during a residency in August 2020, this issue is an experiment in sustained processing, reacting, digesting, composing, and mobilizing. Following the residency, TZ3 took the form of a video reel that served as a roving series of projections across Honolulu as part of For Freedoms’ 2020 Awakening billboard initiative, launched across all fifty U.S. states.

For HT22, TE instigates CAFE, a social-practice experiment in reconsidering how food, art, and service are grounded in the act of publishing. Designed by Marika Emi in collaboration with Ayaka Takao, e-nico, Grace Greennagel, Malia Gonzalez, CYC, Lise Michelle, Jasmine Reiko, FRNTBZNZZ, and Aaron Wong, CAFE re-imagines a space on the ground floor of the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum previously occupied by several chef-driven museum cafes before its vacancy in 2020.

During CAFE, TE’s mode of publishing is translated into physical production while maintaining the same guiding principles found in their publications: the space must incorporate the tropical diaspora; it must be fluid, hybrid, non-hierarchical, and dialogical with those who interact with it; it is not presented ‘for’ any specific audience. The textual experience of a publication forms the basis of the spatial experience of CAFE; food is designed and served in a series of small-scale ‘editions’. The act of consuming food at CAFE encourages participants to engage in a sustained, critical manner; with ingredient choice, sourcing, production, and scale all carefully considered in order to disrupt normative and often exploitative practices within the food and service industry worldwide. CAFE’s plant-based food editions—run collectively and hyper-locally—provide an alternate model of what nourishment in the arts and tropics can be.

For more information about the limited-edition CAFE zine, click here.