July 29 & 30, 2025
Sun Wah Centre & McLean Park
6:00- 9:00 pm
During the summer of 2025, Toronto-based artist and writer Annie Wong came to Vancouver for a residency and facilitated a research and development workshop in collaboration with Vancouver artist Vanessa Richards. This site-specific programming was carried out with the support of Derrick Chang and the LIVE Biennale.
there are many kinds of power was inspired by Audre Lorde’s seminal essay, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In it, Lorde writes of the erotic not in the limited sense of sexuality, but as a wellspring of creative force, rooted in the deep, embodied knowledge shared among Black women. In this workshop, Wong and Richards honour the specificity and brilliance of that context. And from it, extended an invitation to explore what this knowledge could grow toward—especially in the hands, voices, and bodies of racialized women, gender-expansive people, and co-conspirators of care and culture.
Wong and Richards articulated their invitation to gather as follows:
Together, we will explore what we’re calling: erotic solidarity— the power that emerges when we gather, create, move, and sound ourselves into collective presence.
Over the course of two evenings, we intend to:
- Engage in poetic and gestural exercises that draw on collective listening, improvisation, and sound-making as forms of erotic solidarity
- Learn from one another’s creative practices, sharing stories, insights, and artistic lineages
- Walk through the layered geographies of Vancouver’s Chinatown and the former Hogan’s Alley, moving together through histories, memories, and possibilities
- Join in choral and sonic experiments that honour our individual and collective presence
This gathering brings together artists, activists, and community members in an embodied exploration of connection, creativity, and power.
Through this, we ask:
- How can our togetherness become a symbol of collective power?
- How might we move as a fluid procession of gestures—intimate, resilient, creative?
- How might we embody erotic knowledge as a way toward solidarity, joy, and repair?
Participants
Djaka Blais, Ramona Chodzicki, Beverly Ho, JB the First Lady, Marilyn Jung, Feven Kidane, Melody Ma, Vinson Ng, Maya Preyshon, Brandon Wint, and Paul Wong