Once upon a time there was a strip mall in South Vancouver, on Granville Street across from the big Safeway, just next to the public library, and not far from the Fraser River. On the morning of January 3, a dead woman was found in the parking lot with two suspicious incisions on her neck. A thin trail of blood mixed with a sinister green substance bewildered the patrons and shopkeepers. Bernadette stumbled upon a bloodied corkscrew. @munchenwithmili lurked around with their phone. Sheila clutched onto her tinctures. And then, Pest Detective Star dropped from the sky… Retail Vérité: Vancouverama is A Maior’s second novella, and the outcome of writing workshops led by A Maior at Western Front in February 2025. Through a blend of improvisation, LARPing, and speed dating, the participants sketched the characters, narrative, and setting in real time. The cohort featured James Albers, Kathy Feng, Manon Fraser, Fiona Glen, Tiziana La Melia, Ben Lickerman, Trey Le, August Mesic, Nina Ortiz, Paige Smid, Kiel Torres, and Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora. A Maior is a clothing and home goods store located in the outskirts of Viseu, Portugal. Since 2016, an eponymous exhibition program has been hosted within the shopping environment. A Maior is managed by the staff, the artist Bruno Zhu, and his family. A Maior has been featured in exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto; X Museum, Beijing; Life Sport and BQ, both Berlin. In 2022, A Maior was the writer-in-residence at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, who commissioned Retail Vérité, A Maior’s first novella. Bruno Zhu works and lives between Portugal and the Netherlands. His practice employs methods that cut, stitch, and write against normative alignments of knowledge production and social reproduction. Recent projects include exhibitions at M HKA, Antwerp; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Para Site, Hong Kong; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Veronica, Seattle; and What Pipeline, Detroit Paperback.
