Toronto

CIHO Toronto was a busy time.  We drove the exhibit down from Wiikwemikoong one day. The following afternoon we set up and opened with an evening event at Buddies in Bad Times Cabaret in Toronto’s Gay Village. Friends of the project and a whole different public came out to meet the chairs, hear CIHO contributor Hiroki Tanaka perform, and share their stories, with art contributions rivalling those of the i-Gen students in Saskatoon. Our wonderful Story Space Toronto leads, Mike Ruderman and David Berman, got us three great audio stories and some brave typewriting as well.

Buddies was fun with a political purpose. With the help of the Senior Pride Network Toronto, CIHO  launched Alf’s Rainbow Seniors Chair to raise awareness that homophobia and a lack of attention to the mores of queer culture can make care home life hard for 2SLGBTQIA+ residents. In some Canadian care homes chosen family were excluded from pandemic primary caregiver lists because they were not blood relations. Other rainbow seniors report discriminatory treatment in residential facilities. Some opt to go back into the closet to stay safe. 

Next, we drove CIHO uptown for an eight-day visit to Christie Gardens Care and Apartments, where Mike and David set up the Story Space in the hub of the resident activity that is characteristic of this exemplary Toronto facility.  CIHO’s nine chairs were distributed in the spaces between the cinema, the jigsaw corner, the café, and the classroom. Ethel Tungohan displayed images from the Matatag: Filipina Care Workers During COVID-19 collection of photographs taken by care workers in the pandemic. An opening night event featured journalist Moira Welsh, CEO Heather Janes, and me as CIHO creator, all of us outshone by the power of the resident and family testimonials that followed our presentations.

CIHO always worked best through an iterative process, we were small enough to respond to local possibilities. Alexa Roggeveen is an early riser, a prof in Sheridan College’s Social Work Gerontology Program, and an intelligent and opportunistic individual. She emailed me at 9 am on a Monday in spring 2023 – could the exhibit come to a community west of the city? By 10 am the next day we had met and decided to go for it, and Alexa had secured funding to shift CIHO to the Active Adult Centre in Mississauga. Then CIHO was back to Toronto for a final three days at Castleview Wychwood Towers, the city’s largest municipal long-term residential care home. We set up shop at just inside it’s front doors, the facility’s epicentre where a world of nearly 400 residents and an army of care aids, RNs, cleaners, and auxiliary staff passed by. The stories we got were golden.

Thank you: David Berman, Doreen Bible, Johnny and Michele Billung-Meyer, Tamara Daly, Noreen Grange, Bonnie Hatfield, Susan Heximer, Heather James, Cindy Jiang, Stephanie Jonsson, leZlie lee kam, Hannah Maitland, Judith Nassuna, Alexa Roggeveen, Mike Ruderman, Laura Surman, Diana Sweatman, Hiroki Tanaka, Moira Welsh, our Toronto volunteers and storytellers, and the Buddies, Christie Gardens, Active Adult Centre, and Castleview Wychwood Towers communities.

Below, we present a selection of art and excerpts from our Toronto Story Spaces.  Click the embedded links to access story selections or scroll down to the bottom of the page to access the complete Toronto Story Archive. All audios and non-accessible texts have been transcribed.

MARTHA DAVIS is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and retired teacher. A resident at Christie Gardens, Doris met Martha though a therapy dog program. Martha came into the Christie Gardens Story Space to share how much she missed her creative friendship with Doris, who had “exited life on her own terms” during the pandemic, and to show us the Dream Scenes images that they had created together. In this project Martha and Doris used green screen photography to relive events from Doris’ life.

Doris and Martha’s complete set of Story Space Dream Scenes can be found in the Toronto Art Archive. You can read Martha’s story about meeting and working with Doris HERE.

JANE FRENCH, a City of Toronto artistic creator/event producer/museum curator, was redeployed to Castleview Wynchwood Towers on April 2nd 2020. Her new pandemic job title: High Level Sanitizer. We were delighted to talk to Jane when she dropped by the Castleview Story Space and even more excited to hear that she had written about the new care home world in which she found herself.

Jane’s complete diaries can be found in the Toronto Texts Archive. An extended audio interview with Jane about this fascinating period is her life is available in the Toronto Audio Archive, accessible through the portal below.

Toronto Story Archive