Description

cop city swagger conducts a threat assessment of the police, spanning from 2019 to 2023 and grounded in Eng's deep connections to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Chinatown neighbourhoods. cop city swagger scrutinizes the words "safety" and "care," questioning whose "safety" matters in the city of Vancouver and elsewhere. Extending the critical and documentary poetics of her previous work, Eng collates and deploys language from sources both trustworthy and untrustworthy, juxtaposing institutional rhetoric with acts of neglect and violence towards BIPOC and unhoused people. With an eye trained on justice, cop city swagger presents a panoramic media montage of structural wrongdoing, working to map a system that is always moving and always obfuscating.