Joanne Leow: I really love how you’re equating surface—not equating, but kind of linking this idea of surface to things people say, how we talk about stuff, like almost the discourse that surrounds—but the kind of surface discourse that we just talk about when we talk about movement. What, to you in your mind, linked this idea of this movement on this placid surface of the bay…what do you make—like that linkage, I’m just so interested? (0:23) Shazia Hafiz Ramji: I think that so much of our relations are shaped by visibility, just what we can see and what we can’t see, and so that was one aspect of surface that I was trying to give weight to. But also, I was reading this article by Charmaine Chua, which is published in a magazine called The Funambulist, which is published out of Belgium, but it’s a really great magazine about objects and design, that sort of thing. And she wrote this article about the history of the container, and in it she says—there’s this line that I’ve quoted in the book—and she says about the container that “it doesn’t matter what’s inside, it only matter that it flows.” So, this idea of circulation and visibility was really important to me to see just how these relations are formed. (1:00) Joanne Leow: It’s really interesting because if you think about the container, it’s contained, it’s actually just like a closed space; if you were stuck in it, that would suck. Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Yeah. Joanne Leow: But at the same time, it’s the link to these transnational flows. I was thinking about, as well, the changes to the Vancouver coastline and your poems trying to come to terms with this disorienting experience, of seeing things moving, and being on that water from being in the Teck Gallery. So, what do you think has been your experience working and writing and living in Vancouver in the past couple of years? (1:26) Shazia Hafiz Ramji: That’s a really really big question. I feel like it’s been extremely difficult living here. Joanne Leow: Yeah. Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Just as an artist, especially, you know if you’ve—you brought this up in your talk yesterday, just the, developers using sort of poetic language and artistic language to sell the west bank. Promotional material has, you know, fight for beauty, and all these sort of…poetic— (1:48) Joanne Leow: That’s so disturbing. Shazia Hafiz Ramji: —artistic phrases. So, this co-optation is something that’s really bothering me, and it’s my—I think it’s my job as an artist, as somebody who’s working to understand how these systems work, to articulate how they’re working. Because in theory or in class we would talk about it in terms of complicit critique, where the critique itself is embedded, or something’s co-opted; so in order to have any way to resist, the layers of referentiality have to be articulated and broken down in order to have some sort of ground to stand on to say, “oh no.” (2:21) Joanne Leow: Yeah, I know. And then you’re really—then you’re working on the kind of semantic level, you’re thinking specifically about what words mean, what they can mean, what they have been used to mean.