Here are some of our Homeless Memorial community members. We also list groups and events from those who have collaborated with us in the past. Feel free to contact us at torontohmn[at]gmail.com
Rayna, Volunteer
STONE AND GLASS
The title for this project came about in response to the call from Myseum Toronto’s Intersections Festival, looking for artists to work with community groups to help tell their own histories. The intersections at the site of the Toronto Homeless Memorial are numerous; wealth and poverty, power and disenfranchisement, public and private space use, secular and sacred; the juxtaposition of the historic stone church with the glass walls of the Eaton Centre seemed to illustrate these clashes and overlaps; the fragile veneer of what we call civilization up against hard realities.
The events of this evening were developed over several months with people who attend and facilitate the monthly vigil. The idea for enlarging the names and projecting them in light came from a conversation over lasagna and cookies, and the sound installation was the result of an idea that emerged from community members desire to personalize the list and tell stories that will remind us that each of these people were individuals, known and loved in their time by friends and family, by workers in shelters and drop-ins, by a community.
The tremendous contribution of Jim Houston, artist, activist, historian and Holy Trinity parishioner, has given great depth to the evening. His many years of documenting the faces and stories of the Holy Trinity community through sketches and interpretive panels truly bring the social justice history of HT to life.
We would like to take this moment to renew our call for a committed national housing program and proper funding for mental health and addictions treatment. With the recent example of Medicine Hat’s effort to end homelessness this year we have little excuse for any continuation of the terrible neglect of affordable housing of the last two decades. In the mean time, we need to join in the calls to keep Toronto’s emergency shelters open and properly resourced throughout the winter months.
Red Wagon Collective
Red Wagon Collective Saturday Art Group is excited to announce the Toronto Homeless Memorial Quilt Project in partnership with the Trinty Church Homeless Memorial. We’ve been working on the quilt project collectively for the past year and the experience of creating this together has been profoundly healing as we participate in the mourning of our friends and loved ones through arts praxis. The Quilt Project has inherently sparked many conversations within our group on the housing crisis and neoliberalization of homelessness.
The Red Wagon Collective Saturday Art Group is a collective of low income; homeless (shelter users and street sleepers); inadequately/institutionally housed; recently incarcerated; and low income people.
We refuse to forget those whose lives have been abandoned by the state. Instead, we choose to remember, mourn, and organize.
The Homeless Memorial Quilt Project aims to create a mobile, accessible means of mourning in the homeless community. As many street involved folk are buried in unmarked graves in the far ends of the city. We plan to continue on in this project and have begun a second quilt for the year 2016. The Quilt Project will be shown at every memorial. We will have a table set up in the church for people to participate in the ongoing quilt project by painting the name of a friend or loved one who has died of homelessness on a fabric square. Each square will be sewn together for the next quilt.