Eppchez!
Eppchez! is a theater artist, musician, designer, and poet. Eir work follows Quaker practice and eir lived liminal experience as a transexual, non-binary Jewish/Cuban mongrel.
In 2012, Eppchez started Alma's Engine; a process focused production company/creative ministry developing eir new work across a variety of performance genera. A generator, spreading whimsical and earnest dis-ease to interrupt stuck conversations with truthiness. Alma’s Engine has produced 6 new works in the past 6 years, retracing many kinds of erasures from the emotion of economies motivated by scarcity, to quotidian environmental degradation, to the functions and effects of Whiteness, to historical gender nonconformity.
Eppchez! uses puppet making as a tool of sexual self-determination to approach gender euphoria in the ongoing search for authentic presentation. Ey founded Darb Garb in 2016 as a home for non-binary intimate design; a creative technology helping non-binary people claim and honor themselves.
Awarded Grants
2021
Art and Change Grant (ACG)
Related grantees
Overview
Eppchez! will pay trans people to create content for tiresian.life, a blog offering resources, wisdom, and connection for gender-expansive seekers. They will curate accessible, cheap, and DIY affirming tactics including clothing alterations, traditional medicine, insurance hacks, exercises, and mutual support networks for and by trans people. Through the blog, Eppchez! will grow an online community for sharing Queer and Trans strategies, a platform where gender-expansive people can share their genius with each other and create a future that values their counter-cultural experiences and preserves and archives their current strategies so that gender-expansive ingenuity can never be erased from the future.
Partner
2019
Residencies
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Overview
Leeway’s 2019 Art and Technology Artist-in-Residence, Eppchez (ACG ’15), will focus their residency on creating Gender Affirming wearable art objects, also known as “Darb Garb.” Darb garb is a community-focused process that invites individuals to consult, create and reflect on pieces that will allow them to define and affirm their own identity. Designs range from packers, prosthetics, face masks, garments, alterations, added pockets, hats, horns, hooves and etc. Through the process of developing pieces to affirm and celebrate the fluidity of gender, Eppchez’s work will center comfort and health in all aspects.
2018
Art and Change Grant (ACG)
Related grantees
Overview
Eppchez!’s project, DarbGarb, will design and create gender affirming, non-phallic, soft art objects for 15 to 20 trans/nonbinary individuals to wear in their pants. The goal of this celebration of self-determination is to bring healing and confidence to wearers. Ey will document each wearer’s process and the outcomes of these explorations into uncharted authenticity in gender self-determination will be curated and shown in a public show.
