More Meet the Crew!
Nora Mutlaq is a proud 2nd gen queer Filipino and Palestinian. She strives to make as many connections as she can in her communities in Indy through art, circus, activism and food. She spends most of her time training circus arts like trapeze, lyra and juggling. Since becoming an instructor at the circus studio, she has started a program to bring circus and joy to the Indy queer community via community events and free nights at her studio. Her plan is to eventually expand the program to communities of color.
As a circus artist, her body represents her art. She wants to be able to participate in this series because she wants to know more about the lost body art form and the lost history of tatak. As someone who is covered in tattoos, she wants to connect with a side of Filipino history that celebrates and respects the tattoos that once adorned the bodies of our ancestors before Christianization and colonization shamed and erased it from the indigenous people.
Her mother was also an orphan from the Visayan region and grew up on the island Negros. She doesn’t know much about her roots, and Nora would love the opportunity to take an in-depth look at the region and the history of tattooing in the Negros to eventually teach her mother about what she has learned.
Eventually her hope is to work with a Filipino tattoo artist to create designs that are representative of her family, her communities and herself to mark her body in symbols that were once central to native Filipinos.