“Wherever I Am, Nevertheless You Are” is a sonic autocartography built from a zine I created in the spring of 2024 entitled “My Dinner with Diaspora.” The zine follows myself, a 1.5-generation Pilipinx-Canadian migrant, haunted into having dinner with my five-year-old self right before immigrating from Manila to Toronto. My web of diasporic identity grew after I moved from Toronto to Vancouver for graduate school. This sound work explores my multisensory experiences in Manila, Toronto, and Vancouver through bodies of water and social networks. While I satisfy longings for Manila’s saltwater seas through Vancouver’s Pacific shores, I developed my sense of Pilipinx identity within Toronto’s lakes and diasporic communities. In this piece, I express the ways these waterscapes compound to form my feelings of everywhere/nowhereness as a Pilipinx migrant. The work consists of a score I have arranged, including the sounds of synthetic and acoustic instruments, conversation, my childhood voice, the movement of water, and meals I have shared. In the accompanying text, I reflect on what is generated from the convergence of imaginaries where my senses in one location conjure memories of another, and memories cement with the discovery of diaspora anew.
Roxanne Bella (Tue,) studied this question.