Imagination for Liberation

Malivia is an immigrant settler located on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations unlawfully occupied by Canada. Malivia loves that our bodies remember what worlds of balance and knowledge feel like. This collective felt inheritance is from where they source their imagination.

Artist Statement

I created A City Is A Gut Fantasy during a residency where I was working with Jae Lew, a local new media & sound artist and dear friend. They were making synthesisers that used their ancestral fermented foods as resistors to produce eerie analogue electronic music. Through their work, I was able to think more deeply about my relationship to land and kinship. We were both interested in bending space and time through the electric hum of industrialization, and through land via food. In this zine, I reflect on the sense of kinship I felt at diasporic marketplaces like in Vancouver's Punjabi Market, that for me, have been largely mediated through commerce rather than a real sense of caring about one another. I wade through capitalism’s role in south Asian diaspora cultures, and the complicity in and connected struggle to anti-Black and settler colonial worlding.

Reflection and Connection to "Imagination for Liberation"

In this zine I tried to hold the grief, overwhelm and confusion of my cultural alienation, while also witnessing the invitations to get lost in the romance of decontextualized culture. This ‘romance’ was revealed to be the loud silence of the real context of our displacement as South Asian immigrant settlers: anti-Blackness, colonialism, settler-colonialism, and it’s reinforcement through the imperial progressivist project of ‘multiculturalism’. This zine is meant to destabilize a linear diasporic identity formation that often happens through food, and is often at the centre of diasporic art-making. It is a call to complicate our relationships, strengthen our solidarity, and take our roles in settler colonialism as Asians seriously. Imagining liberation to me means imagining our identities and relationships to be ripe places for global anti-imperialist, anti-colonial struggle.