Before class our class on Monday, Alex messaged our project group chat with a screenshot of the demolitions on Oak Street she found from an Instagram post. We wanted to try to find the place and take pictures for our project, a zine. On the way to Regent Park, the group that travels together from U of T passed by the demolition. Everyone intrigued, we stopped to stare and discuss. As the official paparazzi for the class, I was snapping pictures of the site when Aditi noticed a sign with ‘DANGER DUE TO TECHNOLOGICAL DEPENDENCE’ written, thinking it was funny asked me to take a picture. After snapping a few pictures, I continued walking with Esi to the community centre, but we noticed something – there were many more signs! They were many more attached to the fence surrounding the demolition site. We thought it was some kind of art exhibit or protest, but we aren’t sure. Maybe it’s a Banksy?
During our workshop time, we told the rest of our group about the additional signs. Being millennials, we jumped at the idea of making our own sign and taking pictures of us posing with our best model faces next to the signs. Since our theme is on ‘memorialization of Regent Park’, we have been asking ourselves who dictates the narrative of what gets remembered and how, and we thought it would be fitting to label our sign ‘DANGER DUE TO SELECTIVE MEMORY.’ While scouting a good place to take a photograph we found a spot where if we stood in the middle, on our left was a real construction sign and to our right, one of the fake ones (pictured below). It begs the question, which sign is real?
Well the answer to that question is obviously not ours as it was a hand-made sign. However, that wasn’t our original intent. Alex ran to the dollar store to buy a sign, but this store didn’t have any signs left. While she was away the rest of us went looking for more signs to photograph and at one point, while waiting for her to come back, we started singing Justin Bieber’s baby (I know, what an awful song). We were off-tune, cold, but happily laughing and singing. This is when Amna noted, right behind us was another sign with “danger due to shitty pop songs” written. The sign, totally fitting what we were singing left us wanting to make a Boomerang gif of us transitioning from our resting model faces to dancing along; this would have a been a great gif, except that the app doesn’t automatically save anything so it was deleted. In memory of awesome unsaved gifs, I write this blog post.
Now onto important things. We’ve decided to make a zine and we want to talk about how memories are shaped and who decides what is remembered and what isn’t. We will be exploring this through multiple avenues, namely the things we learned from the guest speakers – how to write your biography and using memes for social justice. The following is an outline of our meeting dates and what we hope to accomplish through our sessions.
Monday, Mar 4: Zine layout and storyblocking
Saturday, Mar 9: Background research → focus on page 9 and 10, look at major street names and their histories and how other places are remembered
Sunday, Mar 10: Submit the media piece to RP staff to get it checked out
Monday, Mar 11: Start making the media that will be involved, work on how to get printing and production of zine
Wednesday, Mar 13: Finish storyblocking, table of contents
Monday, Mar 18: Write bios, make covers
Wednesday, Mar 21: Do the writing for sections
Monday, Mar 25: Make memes and artwork
Monday, Apr 1: Last minute touches, printing, binding
Monday, Apr 8: Presentation!
We spent most of our class time storyboarding and creating an outline of all the pages we want to include in our zine. This will be finalized this weekend and we will send it off to the staff members at Regent Park and ask them for feedback. From there, we will work on the individual sections and progress to physically making the zine. Onwards to zine making!
Members of Remembering Regent: Alex, Esi, Sandy, Huda, and Sahara