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.
Visitors are invited to participate through a workshop table installed in the gallery. Using fabric and other materials, guests can create their own textile cartographies and contribute to a growing collection of collective memories, urban stories, and future imaginaries.
Create Your Own Textile Cartography
A participatory workshop table is available 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.
Upcoming Workshops:
Translucent Cities: Commons-Based Mapping for Seven-Generation Futures is a participatory workshop being presented at the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics (CANSEE) Conference, Changing Tides, October 7–9, 2026, in Mi’kma’ki (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia).
Translucent Cities: Geographies of Memory and (Re)Collections for the Future is a participatory workshop being held at Urbanspace Gallery (date TBA).
Artist Talk: Mapping Collective Memories of the Future will be held at Urbanspace Gallery (date TBA), and a Q&A will follow.
Lisa Ditschun is an artist, urbanist, educator, and PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Social Research at Trent University. Her research explores urban governance, collective futures, Indigenous and western knowledges, and relational approaches to city-building. Working across textiles, participatory mapping, documentary film, and community-engaged research, she creates projects that connect memory, place, and social imagination. She has taught at UTSC and OCADU, and has spent more than two decades working in urban, cultural, environmental, and nonprofit sectors.
Curated by:
Lisa Ditschun