Interviews in Vancouver
These conversations happened over two weeks in January 2018 and then in three days in June 2019.
The contrast between the seasons could not have been greater. I like to think about how the changing weather reflects the polyphonic and disparate voices and stories you hear from a range of writers and artists like Jordan Abel, Wayde Compton, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Guadalupe Martinez, Rita Wong, Cindy Mochizuki, Phinder Dulai, and Cecily Nicholson. What was here before? What is here now? What is to come?
I spoke to them in offices, community centres, the roof of the Vancouver Public Library, university campuses, art centres in Surrey, and in their own homes. Each of them speak from the distinct, amorphous spaces of Vancouver’s intertidal zone ---- its submerged histories, waves of migration, and currents of change. I became so keenly aware of the city’s connections to other smaller and larger bodies of water: rivers, oceans, and tributaries. I went away thinking about its uneasy, unceded land embedded with memories of dispossession, eviction, speculation, gentrification, and exploitation.
Listening at the shoreline here is also to be conscious of the other senses: the smell of the harbour, the grit of the beach, the cold morning light reflecting off the condominium buildings. and the wet wind in your face.