Diasporic Worldings @ Urban Screen at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University.

From November 18, 2025, to February 16, 2026, Diasporic Worldings (16-minute video with w/sound) will screen in the Urban Screen at the Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University.

Diasporic Worldings is an experimental video that explores the experiences of people in the diaspora as they form and imagine relationships with land, place, territories, and ecosystems. It uses the term “diasporic” as an adjective to describe those who belong to a diaspora due to either forced or voluntary migration and “worlding” as a creative process where “worlds” develop through ongoing engagement and interconnections with humans and more-than-humans

Inspired by Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s distinction between archipelagic thinking as fragmentary and intuitive and continental thinking as all-encompassing and systematic, and Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza’s use of frottage drawing as a mnemonic technique to recover an embodied connection to place, the video features actions performed on camera and images involving different approaches to map-making.

It incorporates historical maps and the process of culturing bacteria from domestic places, bodies, objects, landscapes, animals, and plants within these territories.

In Guadalajara and Zapopan, I grew bacteria from “cempasuchiles/marigolds” and “acoxochitles/dahlias”, as well as from the soles of the shoes I wear there. In Vancouver, I grew bacteria from “maples/arces” and oak/robles trees, from the “moss/musgos” at the entrance of my house and from the shoes I wear while walking around my neighbourhood.

Diasporic Worldings will screen daily from 8 am to 9 pm until February 16, 2026

Thanks to the support of:
the Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University,  Ruth Mandujano López, Sarah Shamash, Peter Rauscher and Cecilia Valencia Sandoval.

Text excerpts from:
Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la relation: poésie en etendue. Paris, Gallimard, 2009. Translation by the author.

Cristina Rivera Garza, Escribir es tocar: transcripción, letra manuscrita y tipografía, Conferencia en el Colegio Nacional de México, 18 de febrero de 2025.