Art Metropole

#16852

Retail Vérité: Vancouverama

Writer

A Maior

Price

$25.00

Date

2026

Publisher

Art Metropole, Bierke Verlag, and Western Front

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

978-1-989010-36-5

Size

11 × 16 cm

Length

160 pp

Genre

Arts Writing, Fiction, Available for Wholesale , Art Metropole Edition, Literary

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 for a supernatural mystery in real time. Operating in the spirit of exquisite corpse, the workshops followed improvisational exchanges guided by prompts. As a result, the collective writing process generated its own distinctive internal logic to draw a playful, critical portrait of contemporary retail phenomena.

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.

Excerpt from Retail Vérité: Vancouverama:
_Alas, the Sun didn’t fully come out that day. The enticing bursts of light through the cloudy cracks were only a tease. With 173 days to go, she, the Sun, was saving her energy for the sensuous dusk of the warmer months. Dusk, the stretch of time between the exhaustion of a day’s work and the carnal promises of the night. She longed for the dalliances with the river, the bay, and the swimmers. To give them a kiss that would thaw their hearts and love all things in bloom: flowers, fruits, puppies, kittens, babies, brunches, frappuccinos, babyccinos, arts and crafts, sex, anal sex, oral sex, side sex, frontal nudity, butt stuff, threesomes, foursomes, orgies, GoFundMe campaigns, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Met Gala, Airbnb, Uber, UberEats, Google, Firefox, Safari, iPhone, iPad, iMac, Samsung, beer belly, pot belly, love handles, baby fat, BBL, breast augmentations, breast reductions, et al. The Sun had her eyes set on glory, so she tended to skip Januarys. The lack of any direct sunlight meant munchenwithmili could lower their screen’s brightness and save some battery. Their outfit change seemed to have worked. munchenwithmili had slipped back to the strip mall, trying to get back the missing wig.
_

—
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.