I’ve spent the last decade building worlds as a musician, filmmaker, curator and cultural worker moving between underground scenes, film productions and public art projects. In becoming a creative producer from the Prairies, I’ve become obsessed with how cities construct themselves through image and stories.
When I work on documentary films, I’m reminded that constructing places isn’t just something we do in fiction. The stories we choose to tell, and how we tell them, eventually become the stories that define a time and place. We are always actively constructing the idea of a place, telling you what to pay attention to. The stories we platform harden into evidence and memory. Almost like we write ourselves into existence.
The work doesn’t just begin with imagination; it requires a certain ambition. A willingness to suggest how something ought to be.
Places, much like film sets, are often dressed, arranged and lit in particular ways. Working in Calgary, I’ve started to recognize this process more clearly, not just in cinema, but in cities themselves. A place is rarely experienced objectively. It is framed through the myths its inhabitants tell, repeat and perform.
Calgary, perhaps more than most cities, has long existed inside a very specific script — cowboy mythology, oil wealth, frontier toughness, corporate glass. Even as the city has transformed demographically and culturally, the art direction has remained strangely frozen. The story told about this place, both internally and nationally, has struggled to catch up with the people now living here.
Political theorist Benedict Anderson famously argued that nations are “imagined communities,” constructed through shared stories, symbols and beliefs. The same can be said of cities. So many forces shape why we view New York as the centre of the world, Dubai as spectacle and excess, and Mexico City as a place for urban art dreamers. These places were narrated into existence through culture, architecture, art and mythology. Alberta, too, was actively imagined into being. Which means Calgary can be imagined — again.
What many people don’t know about Calgary, or Alberta, is that our rugged, cowboy, farmer profile is also invented. It’s a dream articulated by the Canadian state and sold through ad campaigns like “The Last Best West,” then forged into our foundations. It continues to be the myth people across Canada project onto us.
And yet living here has always felt like something else entirely. This place creates the strangest conditions and dissonance — we are landlocked and yet somehow unmoored, like an outpost on a great Canadian lake. Our watchtower is presumably built of jerry cans, leather and steel. We push our heads out of the tower in the winter months and cast our dreams into the thick blocks of snow turned to ice, hoping it will thaw soon. We are suspicious and annoyed yet resolute, watching the others fight over our dreams and desires as if they know us better.
This is quite a romantic depiction of isolation and, at times, even scorn from our neighbours, but stick with me, I think the tower is crackling with energy, and our outpost can guide passing ships not past, but to our shores.
Let me go back to my youth: languid summers of suburban boredom, slinking around the ravine listening to music from everywhere but here, planning my escape with my best friend. “We’ll run away to France and be filmmakers there!” we’d say, with absolute seriousness.
We were young immigrant kids with big dreams, and I remember thinking Calgary wasn’t big enough to hold them. Everywhere I went, I was squinting, trying to imagine I was somewhere else. Back then, leaving felt like the only way to become. Staying felt like a kind of failure, or worse, a lack of imagination. So obviously, the moment I turned 17, I was so very out of here.
But then, a decade later, something else happened.
Entering the world of music and entertainment, marching into Canada’s contemporary art world, I began to say this, at first as a joke: “Oh, I’m actually from Calgary, Alberta” (casual shrug, ironic grin). And then eventually, while touring as a musician in Toronto, New York City and Berlin, with a certain intensity and gumption: “I’m from Calgary. I can only be from Alberta.” (Cue the theme song from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.)
At the start of the pandemic, in the midst of a music tour in the U.S., when we had to return to Canada for a quarantine that would stretch far beyond three months, my brief stay in my mother’s basement turned into something else entirely. The creative circle that I run with looked at this city and thought, with a glint in our eye — “Maybe we stay.”
Touring major cities gave me access to subcultures around the world: artist-run spaces tucked under churches and banks, secret raves, improvised galleries, noise shows, and communities of people held together by sheer belief and restlessness. I began to understand that culture rarely arrives fully formed — it actually builds pressure beneath the surface and moves upward with urgency. The cities I revered were not passive; they were actively constructing themselves, pushing their myths forward through stories and scenes by the people who insist on them.
So, here, in Calgary, we looked at the land with fervour, not at all because the city had fully arrived, but specifically because it hadn’t. Because there was still space to intervene. If a place can be constructed, then we wanted to be at the planning site.
For me, it felt like the creative sector was rapidly changing, but was also starved for energy and ideas. Creatives like us were looking at this landscape with a new set of glasses, ones that showed us that the mountains, the architecture, the political tensions, the prairies and the parking lots could all be gold in the art world.
Hilariously, we called our production house FOREIGNERZ — both cheeky and contextual. This has always been a city of foreigners and immigrants. And I don’t just mean the ones who arrived in the past 40 years.
There was a certain local zeitgeist we were swimming in, like fish trying to go upstream. This city could be anything if you really thought about it. Things were shifting. Power was beginning to move in more complicated directions. Even the traditional powers that be seemed to slowly recognize the value of things beyond the old formulas of oil, finance and extraction. Immigrants informed by a contemporary global ambition were moving in. Artists were reinventing themselves. Young people arriving from larger cities were seeking space to build. Even those who dared to pursue influence and visibility in Calgary were changing. Who was and was not “Calgarian” was changing in real time.
We are once again in a moment of building and formulation. I saw myself as returning to Calgary to hoist my flag in the arts sector, both as someone who wants better for the place I call home and, frankly, as an opportunist. I am both a product of this place and the type of outsider this place needs to once again thrust its identity somewhere new.
But today, the more intriguing reality is that the average resident of this city is not a lone cowboy, oilman or rugged individualist.
The truth is, Calgary has rapidly changed. Perhaps even irreversibly. This is now one of the youngest major cities in Canada, one of the most diverse in the Prairies, shaped by waves of migration, by diasporic communities, by people who arrived here somewhat drawn to the myth, but also to build something else entirely. The average Calgarian today is likely to be an immigrant, an artist, a tech worker, a filmmaker, a student — someone moving between worlds, between identities, between futures.
Sometimes, when the sun is out and I’m hiking through Kananaskis Country, fingers grazing bearberries and poplars, I catch myself imagining that the “average Calgarian” might now include someone like me — a South Indian immigrant raised on a cacophony of global noise: the political unrest and histories of my homeland, the dramatic artistic sensibility “otherness” can produce, and the strange psychic atmosphere of the Canadian Prairies all colliding at once.
We are on the cusp of reinvention once again. My job as a thinker and creative producer is to show you how far to dream. The reality of our futures lies in our capacity to create the new story we want to tell.
Imagine, if you will, that the cowboy is now me. It is now you. We are traversing this strange, surreal land as the singular, odd outpost it always was, but also seeing it as a place of convergence and growth. Because, if you look closely, the infrastructure is already here.
Film sets are forming in the edges of downtown, turning the eccentric and unplaceable architecture of this place into backdrops for horror and fashion films. Tech companies are embedding themselves into the city’s core, building systems and platforms that stretch far beyond the prairie. Public art is expanding throughout each quadrant, insisting that culture doesn’t belong inside institutions but across the surfaces of the city itself. Music scenes are forming in basements, warehouses and strange in-between venues, exporting sound that feels urgent, global, but undeniably shaped by the strange experience of living in this place. Fashion, design, architecture, food — each is beginning to speak in its own dialect, pulling from everywhere else and also here, all at once.
It’s subtle. And, more than anything, the siloed way in which this city exists creates a situation where, as new creative noise bubbles forward, it’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it or actively vested in the goal of constructing the new story. The most interesting part is that it’s being built by people who were never originally imagined in the blueprint of this place.
The small prairie city that once existed here is not something we can return to. We have to set our sights on carving out the new city that is already forming. Where is that so-called Western spirit we’re always invoking? The one rooted in change, in risk, in opportunity?
Why does it disappear the moment we are asked to let go of a mythical version of ourselves?
You are probably wondering if, in making this grand pitch for Calgary as a budding prairie metropolis, I have ignored the political reality of our province.
I think politics actually is the pressure valve, an undeniable part of the script. This is a place marked by friction and contradiction. By a kind of long-standing discontent that has hardened into something loud and, at times, unyielding. You see it in the recurring waves of separatist zeal, in the suspicion of institutions. This place has always felt slightly out of frame, as though it was shot from a different angle than the rest of the nation.
But what we’re witnessing here isn’t conservatism the way people imagine it. If anything, it’s something far more volatile. Alberta has never been politically stable. It has swung between strange, experimental movements, socialist farmers, religious/economic revolutions, conservative dynasties and sudden progressive surges. Eccentric new characters briefly dominate the screen and then disappear. What ties it all together is not actually ideology, but emotion. A kind of restless, underdog energy. A refusal to be governed simply.
The politics, history and conditions of this place are not simple. They are challenging. They can be frustrating, even alienating. But it all acts as pressure. And pressure can be generative.
Every major city, whether it admits it or not, carries a kind of purpose within the national imagination. Toronto positions itself as the centre of gravity. Finance, media, scale: a place that absorbs everything and reflects it back with authority. Montreal operates as a cultural engine. It is language, art, experimentation — a city that insists on feeling as much as producing. Vancouver exists as a gateway. To the Pacific, to Asia, to a kind of global-facing lifestyle that blends nature, capital and image. So, what is Calgary?
Calgary is a generator city. It’s an outpost of contradictions and shifting identities humming with the infrastructure, population, myths and sometimes wild energy small cities need to throw their ambitions skyward and become something greater — a grand city, a true prairie metropolis.
This city is growing fast, and it’s still fluid enough to be shaped in real time. It’s a place to test, to tinker, to build up. It’s what makes me stay and collude with the cowboy spirit I spent my childhood resisting.
Because if cities ultimately crystallize around a sense of purpose, and their identities are actively shaped into being, then Calgary’s identity can’t simply be to replicate Toronto’s scale or Montreal’s cultural legacy. Instead, we operate as a site of invention. A place where ideas, identities and industries are constructed rather than simply maintained. Where economic and cultural forces don’t sit neatly beside each other, but push against each other, competing for relevance and space, generating something new and perhaps even a bit strange.
We cannot keep looking to other cities to experience art and opportunity while our artists leave in search of places that mirror their ambition. A city does not become a cultural and economic centre by proximity or imitation; it becomes one by intention. We have to build the pathways here, so those thinkers and artists —those new worlds — can rise to the surface.