In August of this year, Leah and I presented Liminal Festival in partnership with The Wheeler Centre. Together, we contemplated and unsettled the function of language in the culture around us. Now, we invite you to enter the space once more through responses and recordings. In creating this archive of gathering, we challenge the illusion that an event ends. Instead, it continues in memory and documentation, expanding and thrumming through ripples.

In addition to working as the creative producer on this project, I also had the pleasure of editing this series of responses to the Liminal Festival, a way to extend and think through the three days of conversations. I asked an array of writers who have worked with Liminal throughout the years to respond to specific events in their preferred forms. Shastra Deo responded to poets Jenny Zhang and Panda Wong with a poem of her own; critic-about-town Tara Kenny wrote a scene report; André Dao drew some thoughts from his own panel. In ‘Complicating Visions’, a series of letters between friends, Andrew Brooks writes to Elena Gomez, ‘I wonder if utopia is to be found in the moments—fleeting, provisional—we assemble as a community. Is it in assembly that we might find a language up to the task of making sense of these times?’

I like to think that Liminal Festival served this purpose too. First with the events, and again, in these generous responses. Scroll sketches, tweets and photographs from the festival, watch back over the recordings, and think alongside the seven artists who responded to the festival. May this collection of work serve as a moment that might expand outside of the two days we came together and make sense not only of the present, but of our shared past and future.

— Hasib Hourani
Wangal Country, 12 November 2024