Bryce Krynski

A community hall like no other. Imaginary Ordinary invites the public to map its surroundings.

Imaginary Ordinary is a project that invites members of the communities of Renfrew, Regal Terrace and Crescent Heights to (re)engage with their neighbourhood: The people who live and work there, the built and natural environments, the history of the place and its future possibilities. It's a site for social networking (the kind that happens face-to-face) dreamed up by interdisciplinary artists Eric Moschopedis and Laura Leif, and while the focus of their project is to create a type of “map” of the communities where they live and feel invested, everyone is invited to participate.

Imaginary Ordinary is headquartered on Centre Street, near Eighth Ave. N.E., in a transformed storefront that feels welcoming with its large round table and chairs, mural-covered walls, and kitchen area. It's essentially a community centre, though not the association-run kind you might be familiar with. It's intended to be a democratic space, where anyone can walk in during open hours, make a cup of tea and sit down for a chat.

The storefront is the “hub of activity,” says Moschopedis, which, over the course of the summer will host a series of events, though much of the action is meant to happen outside. To facilitate different kinds of experiences, the artists devised seven kits, which can be signed out and used as starting points for adventure and exploration in the neighbourhood. Contained in what he describes as yellow “suitcases,” Moschopedis says the kits are meant to help people experience familiar places like a tourist might, with fresh eyes.

The kits themselves are charming and assembled with great attention to detail. Guerilla Gardening anyone? Others include a Romantic Drink kit, a Birdwatching kit — Moschopedis shows me the notebook where several people have drawn pictures of the birds they've spotted — a kit called Say Your Piece, equipped with a megaphone, and another called Draw the Clouds. The Ask your Neighbour kit has a series of questions to help shape an interview, and the Make a Movie kit contains a video camera and a screenplay by a local playwright. A wall-mounted monitor in the space will show the movies that are made.

While the kits are witty and playful, and in some cases imbued with politics, they are only the tools to spark creativity and spur real action — that is, interactions between people, experimentation, sharing of ideas and memory-making, among a range of possible interpretations, experiences and outcomes. It's in the hands of the participants.

The community that Imaginary Ordinary hopes to engage is diverse: the affluent, the marginalized, the homeless, people who have lived in the vicinity for 25 years and longer, newcomers, students of all ages and people from different ethnic backgrounds.

This diversity is reflected in the range of activities and the way they're framed. Imaginary Ordinary hosts vegetarian potluck dinners, weekly evening walks through different parts of the neighbourhood, a public lecture series called “Tell it Like it Isn’t” where locals talk on a range of topics based on their own experiences, and its counterpart “Kids Talk Sharks” where kids take the spotlight to discuss subjects that matter to them. The exchange of information and experience is the essence of these sessions and several others at the centre. Suggestions for other activities are welcome — Moschopedis and Leif can help realize your ideas related to the project.

All of it is open-ended and intended to engage participants as co-creators. As such, a degree of trust, respect and self-reflexivity is required by both the artist facilitators, who have to relinquish a certain amount of control, and on the part of the participants. For some this could be tricky, but Moschopedis and Leif have a refreshing faith in the competence of audiences and recognize that they “are intelligent, have the capacity to be critical, and are responsible,” according to Moschopedis. This sentiment comes across in the various components of the project.

Imaginary Ordinary has multiple layers of meaning. While seemingly every detail is thought out and organized to make the project inviting and accessible, it simultaneously deals with a set of complex ideas around participatory practise, moves back and forth between the boundaries of various disciplines, and provokes questions about how we can measure the outcomes of such projects, when process and experience are central to their meaning.