OPENING RECEPTION – BEGIN ANYWHERE: A Translucent City – Collective Memories of the Future
Thursday, September 3, 6 – 8PM
What do cities remember? What knowledge do we carry forward? And what futures become possible when we imagine our cities with responsibility to the next Seven Generations?
A Translucent City: Collective Memories of the Future is an evolving research-creation exhibition emerging from Cities for Seven Generations, a broader interdisciplinary project exploring how memory, relationships, and lived experience shape urban futures.
The exhibition brings together illuminated textile cartographies and a documentary film, developed through community conversations, storytelling, participatory arts-based research, and processes informed by Indigenous cultural protocols. The exhibition is a living installation that continues to evolve through participatory workshops and public textile contributions.
The film explores urban conditions through participant stories, reflections, and experiences of urban life. It invites viewers to consider how cities might be experienced by others and to imagine alternate urban futures through relationality, reciprocity, and stewardship.
The translucent textile works trace the social and relational geographies that make urban life possible. Layered fabrics, stitching, light, and shadow reveal memories, relationships, embodied experiences, and aspirations that often remain unseen within conventional narratives of city-building.
Together, the textile cartographies and film offer complementary ways of understanding the city. These works explore how people experience urban life through relationships of care, resilience, belonging, hope, and responsibility across generations.
LAUNCHING AT THE OPENING RECEPTION: Create Your Own Textile Cartography
A participatory workshop table is available starting at the opening reception and continuing throughout the exhibition, inviting visitors to create small textile maps that explore their own stories of memory, place, care, resilience, hope, and regeneration.
The exhibition emerges from and continues through a series of workshops, where individual acts of making become part of a larger conversation about the cities we inherit, the relationships we steward, and the futures we create for Seven Generations to come.
Curated by:
Lisa Ditschun