When Lisa Benschop was finishing her degree at the Alberta College of Art and Design, she could see change all around her. Key cards to access rooms, rules about who could use certain workspaces, clean lines replacing rough edges, spontaneity replaced with regimentation. It made her yearn for a different time.

“I picked up the torch of nostalgia as something to champion,” says Benschop. “I guess, observing what was happening at the college and relating it to society at large, the broader picture we live in, I felt like a lot of really wonderful old ways were being pushed aside and forgotten entirely.”

As a result, Benschop created the L.S. Benschop Institute for the Preservation & Veneration of Imagination & Nostalgia, an ongoing investigation into what we are losing, where we are going and how those two might coexist. It involves reading, writing, creating events and making art from found objects. If that sounds a bit ethereal, well, it is.

This summer, the institute has set up residency in the Sugar Shack, a beaten down little building that operates as a sort of arts centre off of Confederation Park in northwest Calgary. The intent of the summer-long residency is to include people in her investigations through participatory activities.

Benschop’s creative practice isn’t about hard-copy results, at least not yet, and she’s not against technology or progress entirely.

“There’s a really funny dichotomy because what happens to me is that often the work that I do within the institute is really quite private and personal, it doesn’t always become a show or something that I can demonstrate very easily,” she says. “So I take documentation photos or I’ll write a little thing and I’ll end up posting it on Facebook, or on my blog. So it exists on technology and nowhere else, unless I talk about it.”

Her practice is also about bringing people together, all old-timey and face-to-face. So far, her residency has included an inner-city nature-appreciation excursion and a lazy day.

“I invited people to come and just experience leisure time,” says Benschop. “That’s another stream of research I’ve been working on, so I had a number of texts that we referred to. One of them was titled The Challenge of Leisure and another one was titled In Praise of Idleness. So we kind of just referred to the text and practiced leisure and idleness.”

Was it successful? “Yup, we did a really good job.”

On the nature excursion, despite mostly viewing mosquitoes, the group broke into conversations about past interactions with animals and experiences in nature. It ties into nostalgia, and also the art of storytelling.

One area of study for Benschop is “narrative anthropology.” She is curious about personal stories, real or imagined, and how they tie into a larger societal narrative. She creates stories and identities from found objects, relating the items that we keep with how we are defined. It started after Benschop noticed a pattern in some of her books.

“The institute has an archive of artifacts that relate to these fictional, or semi-fictional characters,” she says. “That’s kind of where it started at first because I was finding these books, in the front cover they had the name Ken Skulsky scratched in. Ken had been the previous owner of these books. But I found them in different bookstores around Calgary at different times. It occurred to me that me and this guy, Ken Skulsky, must have had something in common even though we’ve never met because we’re interested in the same topics and the same kind of books.”

“It’s really weird. So that’s where it began. I started to think ‘Who is this guy and what was he like?’ So I invented him for myself from the little bit of information I gathered out of the books and the kind of books they were.”

Skulsky now exists as a grey-fedora-wearing, Russian-tarot-card-carrying character in Benschop’s imagination. He seems a perfect blend of her interest in nostalgia and imagination and that’s the way she wants to keep him. Like her practice, she prefers he doesn’t become something concrete by meeting him in person.