No Comfort in Community: Loneliness and Fanaticism in Liz Cairn's Inedia

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No Comfort in Community: Loneliness and Fanaticism in Liz Cairn's Inedia

“Hunger is a wound of desire.”

Decreed by the seemingly harmless guru of a commune nourished by the sun, this statement sets the tone for a film that hungers for connection, yet centers characters that can’t help but seek it in the wrong place. Immediately, the warm and intimate feel of Liz Cairn’s film is set in stark contrast with the uncanny music and ominous narration, creating a sense of unease that doesn’t quite leave you, even when a false sense of comfort permeates the commune and its members.

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Solarpunk Zine Making as a Ritual of Grief

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Solarpunk Zine Making as a Ritual of Grief

I’m hunched over a folding table at Enabling Arts. Marker ink on my first zine spread is still wet; it mingles with the deep-fried scent drifting off the Jollibee chicken and fries I’ve saved for later. Snip, snip—someone’s scissors keep a heartbeat beside me. On the page, I’ve written: i feel guilty while others suffer in quiet rooms. but grief and joy can live together after Lapu Lapu Day. Zine making, I’m learning, is a space where comfort and agitation coexist.

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Moving For Love & Backbone: Brandon Wint’s Exploration of the Body and Jazz

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Moving For Love & Backbone: Brandon Wint’s Exploration of the Body and Jazz

“In my twenties, love was the only word I knew”, confesses filmmaker Brandon Wint in his documentary, Moving For Love (2024). The heartbeat of his work; Vancouver-based filmmaker and poet navigates the complexity of Black identity, the intersections of disability & race, and community-making in Vancouver through the lens of love.

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Walking the Garden with Asia Jong

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Walking the Garden with Asia Jong

Asia Jong is a curator who has flowered roots in Chinatown. For the first two years after she moved here, she never left. Her work feels like a love letter to this place. As a diasporic Chinese settler herself, Asia is attuned to the nuances of this deeply political, ever-changing community. At the core of her curatorial practice is people – and a way of being in relation that is as malleable, dynamic, and fluid as water. Her earlier works invite audiences to thoughtfully create relations to Chinatown, sending you searching for the color gold down Pender St, or offering cheap date ideas in Chinatown that are tenderly allusive to the intimacies of her own memories. 

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Novelette Is Trying: An Ode to Black Femmehood in "Vancouver"

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Novelette Is Trying: An Ode to Black Femmehood in "Vancouver"

Novelette is Trying is a heartwarming five-part series about a Black, disabled, bisexual woman falling into a sudden transitional journey in her late twenties. The catalyst of this new era is, unfortunately, a result of her being subjected to the ableism of her ex-boyfriend amidst being broken up with, and being painfully unequipped to articulate the emotional harm that he is causing her through his insensitive justifications for ending their long term relationship of six years. 

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Cosmic Forecast November 2021

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Cosmic Forecast November 2021

Scorpio season is time to get acquainted with our shadows and the unknown. We’re tasked with achieving certainty in so many parts of our lives, knowing where we’ll be in the next five years, even the next five months. We have to know how our creative projects and relationships will work out—what success they will bring, how long they will last—before diving into them. The pandemic has brought us face-to-face with the fact that the future is in shadow, like walking through a dark wood with only a small lantern in hand. Scorpio season allows us the opportunity to integrate that truth instead of running away from it.

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