The Resemblage Project
Project Description

The Resemblage Project is a digital intergenerational storytelling initiative based in Scarborough, located in the eastern part of the city of Toronto, Canada. Responding to the need for stories of aging that reflect profound difference, while sensing in distinct aging experiences the possibility of shared collective action, The Resemblage Project is an emergent, community-facing digital multimedia initiative dedicated to inviting, assembling, and imaginatively re-presenting stories of aging. Launched in June 2019, The Resemblage Project is dedicated to exploring aging as and in terms of intersectionality and assemblage by involving students, scholars, artists, activists, and community members from across the city—and across the life course—who are imaginatively exploring what it means to grow older in Canada. Each digital story is the result of a coming together: of grandchildren and grandparents, educators and students, the arts and sciences, activism and academia. Out of this convergence comes new ways of seeing and being in the world, and new possibilities for collective action. One element that distinguishes The Resemblage Project is the foregrounding and documentation of our process in addition to the hosting of completed digital stories. The “Documents” page includes a comprehensive list of scholarly references and creative resources, and includes a description of the creative decisions that influenced the design of the project logo. The logo recapitulates this project’s major concerns: the final three letters, “AGE,” are situated on the threshold of the logo’s inner and outer boundaries; while older age and ageing is similarly left on the fringes of society, The Resemblage Project aims to bring age back into the common fold of thought. The choice of font, known as “Toronto Subway,” deliberately evokes Toronto’s city transit infrastructure, thereby situating this particular intergenerational storytelling work within a particular national and civic context—and the decades-long controversy regarding inequitable access to public transit that has long been part of Scarborough’s deeply racialized and socioeconomic marginalization within the “Greater Toronto Area.” Heeding the call of Audre Lorde’s insight that “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes we hope to bring about through those lives," The Resemblage Project signals an ongoing commitment to changing the quality of light by which we view aging--and each other--across generational selves [Audre Lorde, Sister Outsiders: Essays and Speeches (Penguin Books, 1984), 24].

headshot
Contact Infomation: First name
Andrea
Contact Information: Last name
Charise
Contact Information: Position title
Associate professor, Dept. Health and Society
Contact Information: Institutional affiliation
University of Toronto
Contact Information: Email address
andrea.charise [at] utoronto.ca
City/State/Country

Toronto, Canada