Project Leads: Lia Tarachansky, Sergio Guerra, Carmelina Martin

Year: 2019

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Utilizing the accessible WondaVR tool, our team will create a 360 multimedia environment in the place of the historic Toronto/Tkaronto neighborhood of St John’s Ward, commonly known as The Ward. The neighborhood was the city’s first multicultural space and where many communities escaping starvation, slavery, and oppression sought shelter.  Within walking distance of the train station, places of worship, and Eaton’s sweatshops, The Ward became home to Irish, Jewish, Black, and other communities and through a particular narrative came to symbolize the colonial strategy towards difference; exploiting the residents for economic growth, presenting them as an unwanted monolith (The Ward was frequently described in the press of the time as the “foreign quarter” or the “slums”) and then displacing them both physically and visually to make way for the very centre of the city’s power.

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Acknowledging the incompleteness of viewing space as a binary, we intend to complicate understandings of temporality and power by interacting with the recent Infrastructure Ontario archeological excavation in The Ward which dug up tens of thousands of artifacts from the place’s recent and ancient pasts. Some unearthed artifacts reflect the residents of The Ward - handmade toys, tools, commercial bottles, hat forms, a 19th century black doll, a commemorative plate of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a book describing the experience of escaped slaves), and a Jewish prayer shawl (belonging to families seeking refuge in Canada from the murderous pogroms of Czar Alexander III). Some artifacts further draw attention to the multifaceted pre-colonial history of Toronto/Tkaronto such as a pre-contact projectile point. Others raise questions, such as an unidentified bomb.
 
Through and since the archeological dig, the city and province have entrenched a binary understanding of The Ward as no longer present - as belonging to the past. The artifacts its agents unearthed became exhibitions both in the institutions whose construction erased The Ward such as the City Hall and the Courthouse, as well as in the specially established “museum of migration”. “Consequently, some 20,000 boxes of artifacts, many filled with the material evidence of the lives of pre-contact indigenous peoples, languish in storage lockers, garages or the basements of archaeologists. While perhaps catalogued, these objects aren’t readily available to researchers, much less the general public, and, in many cases are simply forgotten.” By reconfiguring the place where The Ward once stood in a medium similar to that of Jackson’s we seek to interrogate the conception of Tkaronto’s migrant history as an objectified past and create new spatial possibilities. Transversed, domesticated, colonized, communalized, expelled, evacuated, demolished, and paved over to make way for a parking lot, the site stood for decades as a reminder of the violent potential of difference. Today a bustling center of civic, political, and commercial centrality, the place of The Ward is transformed into an excavatable space of unearthing. This interaction between place and space is theorized by Harrison and Dourish who write that, “space can be thought of as the more abstract term that describes the broader three-dimensional (3D) realm in which we live, whereas place is more socially constructed.” In other words, “space is the opportunity; place is the (understood) reality”.

By creating in 3D we intend to weave together oral, embodied, and visual expression in a series of 360 multimedia at three sites - the public (Nathan Phillips) square, the commercial space (Eaton’s Centre, once home to the sweatshops that employed many residents of The Ward and whose shops today rely on offshore sweatshops), and the institutional space of the City Hall expressed through its historical quilt (commissioned in 1967 to tell the colonial history of the city).  By designing in WandaVR for participation in a plethora of digital interfaces, our project will allow for an accessibility and a spatial fluidity that seeks to reflect our interrogation because like Dourish, we believe that “Mobile technologies enable digital recreations of those physical artifacts, often surpassing them in terms of their locational awareness, scope/timeliness of the content, and real-time possibilities. Because of this, mobile technologies raise new opportunities for the creation of place, allowing people to re-encounter everyday space and understand the structure of those settings.”