WHAT IS THIS?

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Mapping East Van is cartography with the utmost subjectivity, composed of stories shared using various media, but primarily the thread is oral storytelling and community starting with a relational view from my personal positionality. "Vancouver" began as a colonial settlement for industrial logging, and some argue here is the orign of the term skid-rowe from the industry. Since then it has become a beacon of what it is to be a Global City under neoliberal capitalism, seizing Land from, pricing out, and criminalizing those who cannot/will not produce wealth for this system. Due to ECUAD's location in the top-down parasitic displacement-project that is gentrification, with our new campus and as participants in neoliberal capitalism we are (often simultaneously) complicit in and targets of this slow and insidious violence. Capitalism necessitates individualism, erasure of competing narratives, and physical dis-placement. So, my methodology is acknowledging stories of place as collective, formed together, and rejecting further capital constructs of space, time, and status. This matrixed mapping is with the ultimate goal to encourage the idea of neighbourly-ness (1.F) that entails not only basic kindness and respect but also mutual accountability, strengthened relations, and points for resistance and solidarity to flourish. 

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This mapping matrix has begun as the graduation project of me, Mickey, in finishing an Undergraduate Degree of Fine Arts with a major of Visual Arts and minor of Social Practice and Community Engagement at Emily Carr University whose campus moved into East Van during my foundation year in 2017. 

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Portions of Mapping East Van has been created in my capacity as a Programming Research Assistant in the ECUAD fall series Digital and Creative Knowledge Sharing. Specifically I responded to research-creation methods of mapping and storytelling explored in a talk by Dorit Naaman.