My presence as a queer person of colour is usually hyper-visible in public spaces. Particularly in Quebec, this is something that I have unfortunately grown accustomed to. However, the types of physical violence that have arisen from the COVID-19 pandemic—which has been used by the American government to vilify the Chinese state and dehumanize Chinese ethnicity and culture—have made my experiences of vulnerability increasingly ominous, more difficult to map out. Moreover, the racialized considerations that this project had initially intended to situate increasingly compounded meaning, given the acute uprise of anti-Asian hate crimes in Montreal during this time.
1. Articulating fear through materiality
The project I had initially proposed sought to explore one primary theoretical concern, namely, How can state-sanctioned affect be evoked and challenged through the materiality of interactive art in public urban spaces? Due to the concerns for personal safety, I began to deepen a pessimistic view of public life in general, delving into insular confrontation with fear, shame and anger. The desire to approach these feelings through a theoretical or abstract lens seemed at odds with the urgency I felt during every grocery run, as the vulnerability of my body in the public realm felt more and more immediate. When our class attended a first workshop at the CCA (Centre for Canadian Architecture), a Concordia staff member had offered me some medical masks as a material for making interactive sculptures. When I went to pick them up a few weeks later, just as the virus began to spread across the province, the masks suddenly bore a more urgent sociopolitical meaning.
“The department told me to keep some,” the staff member told me .
2. Face masks as medium
I used eight masks from the package to make sculptures that day, folding them into layers of papier-mâché, using tissue paper and white glue until their blueness coalesced into solidifying paper blocks. As these blocks dried in my makeshift studio in the corner of my bedroom, news of people hoarding toilet paper, hand sanitizer and medical masks surged in mainstream media, often scapegoating working class people for supply shortage and social panic. Emphasis on individual responsibility and “rational” consumerism is often used by neoliberal governments to evade state accountability, and I found myself confronting my own internalization of this. I had in my possession a total of 24 single-use medical masks, and felt profound guilt and shame at the thought of being perceived as a stereotypically self-serving and greedy consumer, a thought that itself bore racial undertones. I resolutely gave away the masks and began to use the fabric from a shirt of a similar blue. Without affording it ample thought, I tore away the ‘Made in China’ tag.
3. Papier-mâché and “playing house”
Rather than constructing the brick-like structures which I had originally intended, I ended making structures that resembled abstracted pieces of furniture. The scope of many formations—personal, social, cultural, political—was changing too, demonstrating possibilities for change and adaptation that were indeterminate yet hopeful. I now envisioned these abstract paper-mâché sculptures as a physical envisioning of emergent structures—new ways of building a home, of establishing new foundations and relations in uncertain times. After finishing the pieces, I extended this thinking into gameplay, as I used the structures to “play house”. The first two images here depict a few examples of formations I had assembled. I photographed the pieces separately, subsequently using a photo editing software to digitally configure other formations (demonstrated in the latter two images).These relations exist purely in digital form, devoid of shadows and the visual evidence of gravity to point to a parallel, digitally-based imaginary.
