大象传媒

Jess MacCormack: RECONNECT 2 RESIST

With this project I am trying to bridge the gap between the reality of the people on the DTES and the rest of Vancouver. As someone whose stomach dropped when I bussed by Hastings and Main, starting my PhD at SCA/大象传媒 put me in the heart of the disaster. I stopped being able to look away, to stay away.

Last year I started offering art workshops and meals at Pace Society where I spent more time with folks struggling with trauma, mental illness, poverty and addiction.¹ This led to a few artistic interventions at Oppenheimer Park with Cindy Baker. I have found that spending time and sharing space with people helps me connect to my own humanity, traumas and resilience. I grew up in this city struggling with my own mental health and addiction 鈥� and have lost people to this drug crisis, to these streets.

I began moving cardboard pieces, with text and photos through the neighborhood talking with folks. This felt too heavy handed, and as an outsider I didn鈥檛 want to impose. I documented details of life on the streets, avoiding documenting people directly, then turned these images into cut out objects which became stickers. The smells of bodies, waste and drugs in my mouth as I walked these streets were penetrating. I started handing out lavender to people. This is a quiet way to say hi, show I care and start conversations. 鈥淪mell this, it is so calming.鈥� People started telling me their life stories when I asked how they were doing. While putting up stickers it occurred to me one day that I could use the stickers to put up lavender around the DTES. This felt more ritualistic, like I wanted to put a magic spell of love on these streets.

I know that this isn鈥檛 enough and is mostly symbolic, but I keep doing it. Meanwhile I reached out to organizations and people. Listened to Garth Mullins鈥� podcast Crackdown and then his audiobook Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs. I read all the articles I could on DULF and realized they are in dire need of support to win their case 鈥� and to make having a safe supply legal. With Erica Wilk and Mikiki, we created a zine that introduces folks to some of the amazing orgs working on the DTES. I made postcards from graffiti on the DTES that said 鈥淔UCK THE MAYOR鈥� with Ken Sim鈥檚 address on the back. Then I dropped a stack of pre-stamped postcards at VANDU.

These folks aren鈥檛 harming us, they are being harmed by state violence. Letting a toxic drug supply thrive is violence. Not offering affordable housing for all is violence. Criminalizing poverty and addiction is violence. This will touch us all whether through intention or otherwise. I ask you today to do something. 

鈥淓thical loneliness is the isolation one feels when one, as a violated person or as one member of a persecuted group, has been abandoned by humanity, or by those who have power over one鈥檚 life鈥檚 possibilities. It is a condition undergone by persons who have been unjustly treated and dehumanized by human beings and political structures, who emerge from that injustice only to find that the surrounding world will not listen to or cannot properly hear their testimony鈥攖heir claims about what they suffered and about what is now owed them鈥攐n their own terms. So ethical loneliness is the experience of having been abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard. Such loneliness is so named because it is a form of social abandonment that can be imposed only by multiple ethical lapses on the part of human beings residing in the surrounding world.鈥�²

1. I had done frontline work for many years in prisons, as well as in organizations in Winnipeg and in Montreal in the past. 

2. Jill Stauffer. 2015. 鈥淚ntroduction.鈥� Ethical Loneliness, 1. Columbia University Press.

Ali Shariq Jamali: Wjood-E-Irtika: What Remains After Erasure

This project explores the fragmented, repurposed, and often forgotten dimensions of memory particularly cultural heritage, as it exists across both digital and physical spaces, from the noise of sand to the flicker of screens. It investigates how technological and digital interventions shape memory, cultural identity, and historical consciousness.

Through a combination of research and artistic production, the project consists of six interrelated works. One of the works (I Am, What I have been given) uses a small dataset AI model: I documented the ruins of Mohenjo-daro (a well-planned city of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization), creating an AI system that evolves while tending to forget its own structures. The video work (The man, the object, and the walk in the circumference of a circle) was filmed near Mohenjo-daro and features a performance by my father, whose presence replaces mine to evoke a sense of embodied, familial memory.

(If only in fragments, yet, I too am familiar) include the reconstruction of technical heritage objects based on museum artifacts. These objects are digitally scanned remotely, and the scans become points of observation for remaking them. They are then painted in chroma green and displayed via a live camera feed projection, which erases extraneous elements introduced during the scanning process. Photographic works (Technical drawings by Irshad Solangi) visualize the technical evolution of Mohenjo-daro鈥檚 infrastructures and systems; the diagrams drawn in the sand on the heritage site were created by a local guide. Two large photographic works (September 7, 2025, at 1:33 PM / September 7, 2025, at 2:46 PM) with a greenscreen backdrop represent different moments using the same objects. Collectively, these installations simulate processes of remembering and forgetting, inviting viewers to engage with memory in both its material and ephemeral dimensions.

Rather than treating memory as a fixed archive, the project explores its shifting and constructed nature. It traces personal and historical lineages back to Mohenjo-daro鈥攁 5,000-year-old site of the Indus Valley Civilization near my birthplace, tied to histories I have never directly lived. This distance prompted reflection on what it means to look back at one鈥檚 own culture, especially while studying abroad in Canada. It raises questions such as: How is memory produced and preserved? Can excessive memory contribute to forgetting? The works examine how cultural memory is shaped, erased, and reimagined through both digital and material systems.

Using on-site research, photography, 3D scanning, digital archives, and engagement with local communities, the project explores how memory circulates across physical and virtual spaces. It also interrogates the presence and circulation of artifacts in museums and online platforms, raising questions of authenticity, access, and displacement.

This inquiry speaks to broader concerns around the digitization of heritage and the politics of visibility. While digital platforms offer tools for preservation, they may also reproduce exclusion or overwrite local knowledge. Ultimately, the project advocates for more inclusive, critical, and sustainable ways of engaging with memory, recognizing that acts of remembering are always entangled with what is forgotten, omitted, or lost.