Our Winter 2023 issue considers the complexities of home and placemaking in the face of uncertainty. The issue’s editorial projects offer tools for inquiry, community and familial reconnection, self-expression, and the fight against erasure. While each project is self-contained and reflects the personal ethos of each contributor, a dialogue runs across the issue, connecting its themes and practices into a broader questioning of our established definitions of home.
BlackFlash 39.3 opens with a reflection by Lauren Fournier on her 2022 film The Truck Guys, for which Fournier developed her own conspiracy theory about a secret cult of truck drivers and the parking lots in which they gather. The parafictional film features a narrator desperately trying to understand the world around her while uncovering the truth behind the truck cabal. Fournier’s text reflects on a growing concern around the rise of conspiracy theory culture while voicing the strange experience of returning home to a different, and sometimes frightening, landscape.
In their text “Chinatown Gates: Monuments Towards Decolonial Relationalities,” Lee Rayne Lucke also examines changing urban landscapes, looking at Chinatown Gates and the capacity of cultural monuments to both comfort and alienate the communities they are intended to serve. Through conversations with Karen Tam, Shellie Zhang, and respectfulchild, Lee explores the history, function, and future of Chinatown Gates and asks how cities can create more equitable neighbourhoods for all residents.
Over the last year, Christina Hajjar has written three texts for BlackFlash on community care during times of loss and upheaval. In her final piece, “Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings: Claiming the Hookah Lounge,” Hajjar critiques the laws, biases, and ideologies surrounding the bans on hookah lounges in Canada. She contextualizes how recent legislation impacts these increasingly valuable and vulnerable community spaces while considering a future for placemaking that is embedded in both nostalgia and criticality.
Through the work of Prairie artists Rebecca La Marre, Amy Snider, and KC Adams, Margaret Bessai explores contemporary ceramic practices and the utilization of locally-sourced clay. Although their individual practices differ greatly, these artists share a concern for the land, its histories and future. As Bessai affirms, “across their work, clay transmutes into an experiential language, a methodology for contemplation, and a path to a new lived reality.”
Issue 39.3 also features two thoughtful exhibition responses, each exploring how communities and families can be rebuilt even under the most cataclysmic circumstances. In “Liberating Visions: Adad Hannah’s What Fools These Mortals Be,” India Rael Young shares how a creative collaboration between The Circle Project and Adad Hannah offered recently incarcerated women an opportunity for healing and sisterhood through art making. Angela Walcott’s study of “As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic” illuminates how both the publication and the exhibition foreground Black joy and the splendour of community. Through the work of James Van Der Zee, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, and Renée Mathews, Walcott showcases how family, culture, and history can be shared, reshaped, and reimagined.
Lastly, the issue features two meditations on the relationship between visual and auditory reading. “Kulshan” by Paul Walde is an expansive portrait of a glaciated stratovolcano. Through photography and sound studies, Walde illustrates how Kulshan is a harbinger of our changing climate. “A Typographic Collaboration featuring Julian Yi-Zhong Hou and Shane Krepakevich,” presented by the web-based contemporary art publication Le Sigh, was generated from Krepakevich’s interpretations of Hou’s stained glass works and sound piece Prayer for 4 speakers. The resulting typographic piece is offered here, while the sound work can be found at Le Sigh.
Our connections to the places we live and the communities we embrace is paramount to our sense of safety. Feelings of anger, grief, and anxiety about the ecological and social crisis that surrounds us are normal. As Britt Wray states: “the first step towards coping is engagement.” Searching for new realities will take us to a place of uncertainty, but it is through shared vulnerability that we can start to envision transformation.
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