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feral feminisms
Complicities, Connections, & Struggles:
Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis
of Settler Colonialism
issue 4 . summer 2015
The Right to Remain: Reading and Resisting Dispossession in
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with Participatory Art-Making
Aaron Franks, Andy Mori, Ali Lohan, Je Masuda, and
the Right to Remain Community Fair Team
All photographs by Trevor Wideman
Powell Street Festival/Oppenheimer Park
Tent City Postcard Project, August 2014
Reection, in response to Nishant
15 November, 2014
Dear Nishant,
Thank you for your interest in the
Right to Remain Community Fair
(the RRCF) currently taking place in
Occupied Coast Salish Territories.
We are glad you enjoyed our work at
the Powell Street Festival in August
(http://www.powellstreetfestival.
com). As neighbourhood
artists with the RRCF we are
contributing to the research project
“Revitalizing Japantown?” (www.
revitalizingjapantown.com) through
a peer-led series of participatory arts
workshops for and by DTES residents
and allies. One element is that
labeling neighbourhoods can be a way
of gentrifying them. Maybe there is a
need for “counterlabels”? Maybe, if
marketable new “lifestyle” names like
“JapaGasRailtown” (http://twitter.
com/cuchilloyvr) are commodifying
Front of Postcards: (1) from Powell Street Festival goers to the
Oppenheimer Park Tent City campers: Asahi Men’s Baseball
Team, Paueru gai, Vancouver; (2) from Oppenheimer Park Tent
City campers to the Powell Street Festival goers: Tent City,
Oppenheimer Park, Vancouver, August, 2014
The Right to Remain Community Fair:
Participatory Art as Research in The
Downtown Eastside
“Revitalizing Japantown?: A
unifying exploration of Human
Rights, Branding and Place in
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside”
(www.revitalizingjapantown.ca) is
a three-year community research
project funded by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council
of Canada that links the current
rapid gentrication via capitalist
accumulation in the Downtown
Eastside of Vancouver to prior
colonial appropriations from First
Nations, Japanese, other racialized
residents, as well mental-health
system survivors and low-income
people.
From June 2014 through
January 2015, we are working with
Gallery Gachet (http://gachet.org),
the Nikkei National Museum and
Cultural Centre (NNM) (http://
centre.nikkeiplace.org) and six
other partners to engage low-
income residents in a Right to
Remain Community Fair (RRCF) in
43
The Right to Remain Community Fair Team are coordinator Ali Lohan and
community peer arts facilitators Quin Martins, Andy Mori, Herb Varley,
and Karen Ward. The RRCF is the arts phase of the three-year “Revitalizing
Japantown?: A unifying exploration of Human Rights, Branding and
Place in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside” community research project,
in partnership with Gallery Gachet, the Greater Vancouver Japanese
Canadian Citizen’s Association, the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural
Centre, PACE, the Potluck Café Society, the Powell Street Festival Society,
the Strathcona Business Improvement Association, and the Vancouver
Japanese Language School and Japanese Hall.
feral feminisms
Complicities, Connections, & Struggles:
Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis
of Settler Colonialism
issue 4 . summer 2015
the culture and class of the people
who built the area, we need to counter
with names that represent and
respect the lives of those who have
been and are still being pushed out?
“Japantown” refers to
an old portion of the Vancouver
Downtown Eastside neighbourhood
around Powell Street that was
allocated for Japanese migrants
to Canada (Nikkei) beginning in
1877. Its residents were evacuated
shortly after Pearl Harbor in light
of the wartime paranoia and racism
that became institutionalized at all
levels of government (Adachi, 1976).
So in my mind the revitalization of
“Japantown” could only really mean
a reinstatement of its residents and
heritage there, but the issue is more
complicated than that. Is it in the
interest of some to gloss over history?
The Nikkei obviously weren’t the rst
to be violently displaced out of the
area. The DTES was one the earliest
places of Indigenous settlement in
what became Vancouver.
An Indigenous RRCF
community artist has said that
through his time dealing with the
development of the area he came
to realize that there had been a
whole series of displacements from
this patch of land. The rst one
chronologically was the regional
Indigenous peoples, then the
internment of Japanese immigrants,
then the black residents displaced
by freeway viaducts around
Hogan’s Alley (see http://www.
blackstrathcona.com), and presently
those of low income and marginalized
residents who have no property
ownership (Blomley, 2004). Each
time this has happened it has violated
residents’ “Right to Remain” in what
one local “Revitalizing Japantown?”
participant says “has always been a
Postcards from Powell Street Festival to the
Oppenheimer Park Camp:
Top to Bottom: postcard from Paola; postcard from Lane;
postcard from David.
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The
Fair features monthly Human Rights
Arts Workshops and presentations
at valued DTES spaces like the
Vancouver Area Network of Drug
Users (VANDU), Aboriginal Front
Door (AFD), the Interurban Gallery,
and the Carnegie Community Centre.
In March-April 2015 and October
2015-January 2016, Gachet and the
NNM will host separate exhibits
inspired by these workshops, their
participants, and their arts process.
Art can celebrate and
gather people (and gather people in
celebration); it can also accuse and
scream. Both and all variations in
between are possible. In this spirit the
Fair hasn’t looked to make “good,”
celebratory, or educational art about
Human Rights. We have worked with
partners and residents to develop the
Fair because the ethic of relationship-
building behind participatory art
as research stands in opposition
to the current development model
in the area, which has roots in the
neighbourhood’s colonial history.
This is a development model in
which:
[T]he Low Income community
in particular, which is
overrepresented by its
racialized communities,
indigenous, and particular
migrant communities, is at
a disadvantage as the area
becomes reconceptualized as
an “artist district” without an
analysis of class. (Gachet sta
member, interview, 2014)
Art is an exchange of experience, not just
economy.
It’s often said that the DTES has
the highest concentration of artists
in Vancouver, and quite possibly
Canada. The observation can serve
44
The Right to Remain
Aaron Franks, Andy Mori, Ali Lohan, Je Masuda,
and the Right to Remain Community Fair Team
feral feminisms
Complicities, Connections, & Struggles:
Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis
of Settler Colonialism
issue 4 . summer 2015
poor person’s neighbourhood.”
The links between this
series of displacements struck us
again during the RRCF when the
Oppenheimer Park Tent City sprung
up to highlight both the plight of the
homeless and the Supreme Court
decision on native land rights. This
coincided with the Powell Street
Festival, an annual street festival that
reclaims for the August long weekend
this area of Japantown to celebrate its
culture and Nikkei culture generally.
The festival organizers showed
respect for the occupation of the park
that they would normally use for the
event by relocating to nearby streets
and sidewalks, showing solidarity in
the struggle for the Right to Remain.
In a “Revitalizing
Japantown?” arts team brainstorming
session for the Powell Street
Festival we hit upon an idea. Why
not have the festival participants
write postcards of encouragement
to the Oppenheimer Park Tent City
and vice versa? This would bridge
communities across the divides of
history by showing common concern
for the Right to Remain. Human
Rights should not be abstract gifts
from the powerful—the Right to
Remain is the right to self-identied
homes, identities, ways of making
a living, and tools for resisting
colonialism and gentrication linked
by racist economic exploitation.
I did the graphic design of
the postcards, choosing images from
the men’s Asahi Baseball team, a
legendary local Japanese Canadian
baseball program before the war. A
second set of postcards designed with
a photo of the Tent City occupying
the very area of the baseball diamond
where the men once stood was also
made, to lend a bridge across time in
the same location.
Postcard from Pia.
Postcards from the Oppenheimer Park Camp to the
Powell Street Festival:
Top to Bottom: postcard from Anthony; postcard from AJ.
many agendas and has been repeated
so often that it might be cliché. It’s
not a precise equivalent, but “highest
concentration of artists in Vancouver”
can have the same lazy eect as
“poorest postal code in Canada,” as
generic celebrations of “concentrated
artists” (just add water…) smother
the neighbourhood with prot-ready
notions of “edgy” and “vibrant.”
The City of Vancouver’s
recent Local Area Planning Process
(LAPP) report (City of Vancouver,
2014) devotes a Chapter (14) to Arts
and Culture. The Chapter opens
by presenting “art and culture” in
the DTES as a thing that comes
into being through three areas of
increased investment and capacity:
Improved Arts and Culture Facilities;
Art in Public Places; and Increased
Opportunities for the Creative
Economy (p.143). In a planning
document it’s not surprising that
art is (re)placed into the community
in this way, as Facility, Place, and
(Creative) Economy. Even though it
may not be a building or coordinate
on a map as in a “Facility” or “Public
Place,” the “Creative Economy” is no
less specic in how it locates art in the
DTES.
While it shouldn’t surprise
us, it’s nevertheless important
to remember that handling art
this way mediates our encounters
with the artist’s aective labour
and, more importantly for the
political economy of the DTES,
mediates artists’ relationship with
the place they call home. Rather
than more opportunities for art-
making for artists who live in the
DTES, the “spatial x” creates more
opportunities for investment in art
as an engine for gentrication in
the DTES. All artists have a right
to be paid for their craft and to sell
45
The Right to Remain
Aaron Franks, Andy Mori, Ali Lohan, Je Masuda,
and the Right to Remain Community Fair Team
feral feminisms
Complicities, Connections, & Struggles:
Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis
of Settler Colonialism
issue 4 . summer 2015
Once implemented at the
Festival, over 30 postcards were
written and signed by festivalgoers,
assisted and encouraged by myself
and RRCF arts team members Ali
Lohan and Quin Martins. Using a
rapidly obsolete medium reinforced
the performative aspect of replicating
historic communication practices.
Arts team members Herb Varley and
Karen Ward had the task of taking the
Tent City postcards to Oppenheimer
Park for its occupants to sign and
send back to the festival. There were
formalities, obstacles and issues of
trust in order to get those postcards
signed and sent back, but it was still
being carried on well after the PSF
ended.
I feel the postcard project
to be a great success as a living
history “lesson” in the personal craft
of handwritten cards of solidarity
turned into group petitioning and
in the acknowledgement of Human
Rights, all touched on at once. It also
reminded us all of how the Powell
Street Festival was originally born
of a call for activism and Japanese
Canadian redress, and that historic
apologies still hang in the air waiting
to be said, with their attendant
responsibilities.
- Andy Mori, artist
Works Cited
Adachi, K. The Enemy That Never
Was. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart
Limited, 1976.
Blomley, N. Unsettling the City: Urban
Land and the Politics of Property. New
York: Routledge, 2004.
Top to Bottom: postcard from Janet; postcard from Janet.
their work and skills if they choose.
When it comes to clichés the stale
romance of the starving artist has
had a longer shelf life than most. But
it is very doubtful that “increasing
opportunities for the Creative
Economy” means improved resources
(never mind sales) for the many
practicing artists of long standing
who live in the DTES yet reap no
benets from gentrication.
Art to repossess the DTES (and its
image)
Elsewhere in the LAPP document, the
city refers to strategies to “accelerate
vibrancy” (see the section on “Built
Form,” p.70). But people and places
aren’t simple particles that on e can
slow down and speed up. A strategy
of “accelerating vibrancy” to “increase
opportunities for the Creative
Economy” (p.143) plays out as an
accumulation strategy that rubs out
the concrete complexity of life—the
complexity of meeting needs, of what
change is—through the abstract space
of development. Living, changing, and
meeting needs while under the threat
of dispossession and marginalization
demands an art that exchanges more
than just money.
The individual and
collaborative artworks emergent out
of the RRCF embody this, as does
Andy’s personal description of the
creative postcard exchange between
homeless campers “occupying”
Oppenheimer Park (unceded
Aboriginal territory) with their tents
and longhouse and members of the
Nikkei diaspora attending the Powell
Street Festival. And while many of the
works created during the RRCF (e.g.,
the dioramas below) contain direct
messages of resistance, there is more
to their aesthetic than polemic, or
‘giving voice’:
46
The Right to Remain
Aaron Franks, Andy Mori, Ali Lohan, Je Masuda,
and the Right to Remain Community Fair Team
feral feminisms
Complicities, Connections, & Struggles:
Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis
of Settler Colonialism
issue 4 . summer 2015
Dioramas – (workshop at VANDU, facilitated by Karen Ward and the RRCF Team):
[I]n terms of the trauma and
suering which is part of—in
especially the low-income
communities, marginalized,
displaced communities—
everyday experience…one of
the dierences…is thinking
through these elements as
an element of quality, not an
element of marginalization.
(Gachet sta member,
interview 2014)
The motto of Gallery Gachet, a
Community Partner for the Fair, is
“Art is a Means for Survival.” The
Right to Remain Community Fair
approaches art as a means for shared
debate, healing, pleasure and pain,
and an understanding of what it has
meant and means to survive in the
DTES in the past, present, and future,
using the tools of Human Rights
and art-making. The “Revitalizing
Japantown?” team of researchers,
students, residents, and community
organizations are privileged to work
in a community where art, creativity,
and the complexity of living are
considered basic parts of knowing,
history, and politics, rather than frills
and add-ons.
- Aaron Franks, “Revitalizing
Japantown?” research team member
Works Cited
City of Vancouver. Downtown Eastside
Plan. 2015. URL http://vancouver.ca/
les/cov/downtown-eastside-plan.pdf
(last accessed 27 April, 2015).
47
"Homeland Security" – Herb Varley
The Right to Remain
Aaron Franks, Andy Mori, Ali Lohan, Je Masuda,
and the Right to Remain Community Fair Team
feral feminisms
Complicities, Connections, & Struggles:
Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis
of Settler Colonialism
issue 4 . summer 2015
48
Top: “Homes Now” – DJ Joe
Bottom: No Title - Doronn Dalzell
The Right to Remain
Aaron Franks, Andy Mori, Ali Lohan, Je Masuda,
and the Right to Remain Community Fair Team
feral feminisms
Complicities, Connections, & Struggles:
Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis
of Settler Colonialism
issue 4 . summer 2015
49
”Aboriginal Healing and Wellness Centre” - Tracey Morrison
The Right to Remain
Aaron Franks, Andy Mori, Ali Lohan, Je Masuda,
and the Right to Remain Community Fair Team
feral feminisms
Complicities, Connections, & Struggles:
Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis
of Settler Colonialism
issue 4 . summer 2015
THE RIGHT TO REMAIN COMMUNITY FAIR (RRCF) was a year long community art-as-research component of the SSHRC-funded
community research partnership “Revitalizing ‘Japantown’?: a unifying exploration of Human Rights, branding and place in
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside”. The RRCF Team is Ali Lohan, Quin Martins, Andy Mori, Herb Varley, Karen Ward and Trevor
Wideman. Aaron Franks was RJ-RRCF project Coordinator and is a postdoctoral researcher in Cultural Studies at Queen’s
University, Canada; Jeff Masuda is project Director and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Environmental Health Equity in the
School of Kinesiology and Health Studies (Queen’s).
50
The Right to Remain
Aaron Franks, Andy Mori, Ali Lohan, Je Masuda,
and the Right to Remain Community Fair Team
