This is “Asynchronous Murmurs of Chinatown”, a podcast series produced for the Calgary Chinatown Artist Residency commissioned by The City of Calgary’s Public Art Program in partnership with The New Gallery. The residency was planned to run Spring 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic. The residency began May and concluded at the end of July 2021. The three artists in resident are Annie Wong, currently based in Toronto, Ontario, Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong, based in New York City, USA, and me, your host of the series Teresa Tam, based in Calgary, Alberta. As part of my residency, I’m working on a series of projects that chart and cultivate distinctive connections to Calgary Chinatown, while exploring collective grief as a driving force for its continued existence. I will be retracing Chinatown in several “maps” that each play into the asynchronous moments that make up the community; drawing from experiences tied to physical space, sound/language, and reflecting on change through the use of time capsules. These maps act like markers for a self-guided tour throughout Chinatown.

This audio series utilizes the way sounds connect people across vast spaces and times, but also in how vibrations of audio waves are felt differently in the body and reveals things other senses can’t.