It’s Doors Open weekend in Toronto, the first city to do this and now the largest event like this in North America. This year the them is “Secrets and Spirits…The Mystery Behind the Door” featuring ghost walks and other paranormal-inspired locations, as well as 40 new buildings and special exhibitions like “Utilities,” photos of Toronto’s underground rivers and sewers by Michael Cook (he goes to dirty places so the rest of us don’t have to). Check the whole schedule and list of sites here. Two things of note:
- On Saturday from 2PM-3:300PM I’ll be hosting a Pecha Kucha-style event at Fork York’s Blue Barracks called “Redesigning Toronto” with short-and-fast presentations from architects Michael McClelland, Donald Chong, Siamak Hariri, Helena Grdadolnik, Paul Raff, and Joe Lobko.
- At the city hall rotunda we’re rather chuffed to have been asked if our [murmur] project and the hand drawn Toronto maps by Marlena Zuber could be featured this year. Begun in Toronto in 2003, [murmur] is a mobile phone documentary project that made personal and historic stories available to hear in the location they took place by calling the number on the green ear-shaped sign there. After 10 years there are around 250 locations around Toronto with many more stories on them (we also took the project to over 25 cities around the world, but Toronto is the city that inspired it). Marlena’s maps provided a way of finding the stories on the web, and many of them will be enlarged and displayed in the rotunda (as well as some of her non-[murmur] maps and some from my book Stroll which she illustrated). Please stop by throughout the weekend and help us celebrate 10 years of Toronto storytelling. You can listen to the stories here and check out Marlena’s maps here (and purchase here).
