Animating Archives, a new art-based research project spearheaded by our city’s first community archivist, Jia Jia Yong (@jiallyfish) at @yeg_archives. Jeannine Naboye Kroening (@jeanningkroening), Soni Dasmohapatra (@yegsthan), and Jia Jia just presented their collective and individual performance pieces to site visitors of the C2UExpo2025 on May 12, 2025 and I couldn’t be more proud of them

I’ve been working as this project’s documentarian for the past few months - recording and transcribing meetings, interviewing the artists at different stages, and creating portraits like these to visually capture the energy of the project. It’s been a dream opportunity that combines my love of dissecting an artists’ process, amplifying diasporic Asian narratives, and resisting white supremacy in our colonial institutions.

My two concepts for this styled shoot were contrasting ones. The first takes place in the sterile Archive vaults to visually show the three artists taking up space and to express how our cultures and communities have been here for generations but are either missing from the records or represented in racist ways.

The second concept takes place outdoors and the guiding words were warmth, expansiveness, textural, and sisterhood. Dancing, breathing, and leaning into a more hopeful future where our stories are told more truthfully and honestly.