It’s early May and I’m on a small ferry to the 61st Venice Biennale to see the work of Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka. The cabin of the boat sits low in the water, and I’m seated in the aisle, next to a man by the window who is nodding off. I frequently peer over his drooped head to try to get a good look at the glassy greenish-blue water outside. Ever since I met Hatanaka, I’ve been looking for fish.  I first met Hatanaka a month earlier, back in Toronto. After weeks of emailing back and forth trying to find a time when we would both be in the city, we eventually settled on a date in early April. Her west-end studio ended up being on the same block as my apartment, and I dropped in with fruit, and coffee and croissants from the coffee roaster and bakery nearby. Hatanaka meets me at the door, dressed in sneakers, patterned pants and an oversized t-shirt, her brown hair pulled under a kelly green cap that reads “Parkdale Yacht Club.” We walk up a few flights of stairs to her bright west-facing studio. She crouches over to shuffle away large sheets of washi paper that are sprawled over the hardwood, stacking them into a loose pile on the ground under a window.

I can’t quite remember when I first encountered Sameer Farooq’s work. It may have been during the years I was working full-time in a museum. What I do remember is the surprise of seeing his name, years later, on the roster for a movement class I was teaching at Mosaic Yoga on Sterling Road—just a few doors down from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. I felt shy about striking up a conversation with an artist whose work I so deeply admired. Eventually, though, I gathered the courage to introduce myself as more than his Pilates teacher and asked if he might be open to talking with me about his practice. We met after class one afternoon in early March, settling into Mosaic’s small studio as the season began its slow shift from a frigid winter toward the promise of spring.

I first met filmmaker Kunsang Kyirong last summer at my friend’s coffee shop in Roncesvalles—the Toronto neighbourhood halfway between my apartment at Bloor and Dundas, and her place at the time in Parkdale. When we met, she was in post-production for 100 Sunset—her first feature-length film.  Born in Vancouver, Kyirong studied 2D+Experimental Animation at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Film Production at York University. Her previous short films Dhulpa (2021) and Yarlung (2020) have been screened at various international film festivals and exhibited at The Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art.  Kyirong told me about her newest film, which she centered around a relationship between two young Tibetan women living in Parkdale. The neighbourhood, which is also known as Little Tibet, has long been one whose landscapes are shaped by the Tibetan-Canadian community. For those of us who have spent time in the diaspora, it evokes a familiarity built on proximity, community, and the rhythms of daily life lived in close quarters.