Here’s my art project, “Local Guide (Toronto, Canada)”—a collection of work about the last 5 to 6 years of my life, written in the form of user reviews.
I sometimes wonder if user reviews, aside from social media captions, are the most widely read form of writing today. I wanted to reimagine them more flexibly, and explore how they can be used to document our relationships to places—reinforced by the small moments shared in them and the larger, functional roles these spaces play in a person’s day-to-day life—in a way that is diaristic, interpretive, and that diverges from quantitative 5-star metrics. I hope it encourages you to reflect on the places frequented in your life, too.
For this project, I wrote about 52 places in total, in various lengths and different styles (of course, I got some jokes in there). Doing so also allowed me to start in one place only to find myself wandering tangentially in another, which reflects a lot of how my life has gone, and how life can tend to go.
Everything in this project is true. There’s a not-so-loose narrative arc (it’s intended to be read sequentially, from 1 to 52), and it’s the most personal writing I’ve ever done. Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read through it, for sharing this part of my life with me.
