Desire Paths
Desire Paths are unpaved passages, slowly carved into the terrain of a city, formed by the citizens' own walking tracks, and guided by their belief in a better way.
Desire Paths is a six-part series of audio experiences that explore Toronto futures, designed by artists. Through field trips, self-guided narration, and interviews, each episode will offer a unique view into the artist’s imagination, inviting the listener to reflect on desired paths to shape the next decade in Toronto.
Field trips across the city provide the backdrop for reflection through movement and physical presence, allowing artists to connect their personal histories and lived experiences to their vision for possible futures. With premonitions in mind, the second part of each episode will delve into a conversation between the artist and a city-builder to explore how to bring this desired path into being.
Desire Paths is part of Luminato’s Illuminating Ideas program; a series of conversations and experiences that creatively explore some of the most important issues and ideas facing our world today.
Desire Paths is produced by Alex Rand, and co-curated by Hima Batavia and Alex Rand, with Creative Producers Macy Siu, Jeremy Glenn, and Robert Bolton of Toronto-based foresight studio, From Later.
Desire Paths
Gendai: Collective Futures
“I'm one of those people who believe deeply in the suburbs as a place of brilliance. It’s a place of complexity, but a place of brilliance too … What do we need for collective work to happen, be supported, and to create the conditions for brilliance to not be an exception, but for brilliance to be the constant.”
Part 1
Throughout its 20-year history, Gendai has led experimental curatorial and organizational practices for East Asian artists and artists of colour. As the new stewards of Gendai, Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng are building upon the organization’s legacy of decentering whiteness by investing in the future of BIPOC arts leadership through collective practice.
In the first part of the episode, Marsya and Petrina take us down memory lane, revisiting specific mall spaces in the suburbs of Toronto that hold intimate meaning to their experience growing up as children of immigrant families. Together, they reflect on malls as sites of cultural tension and othering, but also suburban collectivity. The suburban experience of quietness and loneliness ultimately drove them to leave for the downtown city to forge a practice rooted in imagining collective futures.
Part 2
Marsya and Petrina are then joined by independent curator and community organizer Anu Radha Verma. They unpack their shared personal connection to the suburban immigrant experience (in Scarborough, Mississauga, and North York) as a formative seed that influences their advocacy for collective work today. Together, they daydream about creating new language for diasporic identities, amplifying dialogue around care and decolonization, moving from a scarcity to abundance mentality, and re-imagining suburban malls as community hubs that disrupt the capitalist idea of what space is supposed to be.
Anu Radha Verma is a queer, diasporic sometimes-femme, a cis woman, a survivor and a mad person. She believes strongly in the brilliance that exists in the suburbs of Peel. Anu grew up in Mississauga, and has organized across the region. She likes to be identified primarily as an agitator or shit disturber. Anu Radha (or arv) organizes with QTBIPOC sauga, a grassroots gathering of queer and trans, Black, Indigenous and people of colour communities from across Peel. She hosts a weekly show focused on social justice issues in Peel and beyond on Newstalk Sauga 960 AM. Anu is an independent curator, a community-based consultant, and most recently a research manager. She is still figuring out what it means to have hobbies, and dreams about deep and true rest, for those she loves (and hopefully for herself).