VENUS IN ITS FALL [EXCERPT 1]︎︎︎
Video, Ambient Guitar, Voice
Text excerpt taken from Venus in its Fall, an autofiction novel in verse (work-in-progress.)
Screened at absent & sentimental things touch, an art happening at Many Moons Studio in June 2025 in Kingston, Ontario.
Venus in its Fall is a full-length lyric novel that spans a decade across three major cities in the protagonist’s life: Kingston, Ontario; Kelowna, BC; and Shanghai, China. The protagonist, Xiao, is an itinerant 1.5 generation Chinese-Canadian who immigrated to Ontario with her parents from Shanghai when she was five. Home as a theme is complicated by a network of (mostly queer, some intergenerational) relationalities that continue to touch the protagonist through space and time. Its story structure unfolds non-linearly, jumping between the three cities, and thus also crossing timelines and storylines. The narrator’s thematic interjections give the distinct storylines a larger philosophical framework; this framework will be the backdrop against which separate storylines attach and form coherence.
