“In the middle of winter, I at last discovered there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa”, The Summer (1953)
Last semester, I had an incandescent dream of red flowers bursting out of the Marble Room floor, growing frivolously and fiercely, breaking all my models on display. Around then, I was spending a lot of time learning about the displacement, land appropriation, and inequalities in Syracuse’s history, and the dream felt like my subconscious calling: I wanted to fill the Marble Room with flowers and discuss structural violence in a way that’s unabashedly hopeful and unifying.
This exhibition became my attempt at telling such a story. The story is about the city of Syracuse, but it is also about the shared past and future of many American cities.
Stylistically, I see this walk-in storybook as a world for our inner child. Children’s storybooks often distill simple, yet profound answers about love, conflict, ownership, and life. There’s a certain liberation that comes with being a child and the ability to speak freely and directly of love and hope, unburdened by the fear of controversy. I invite you to enter the Marble Room as a child: liberate your hands and feet to touch, move, and discover. Find the clues I left for you in the embedded mechanisms, puzzles, and interactive elements. Open your heart and let your thoughts drift freely in the stories packed behind the Marble Room doors.
As for the narratives, you will notice that all three stories are told from the perspective of non-human lives in our city—cicadas, dandelions, and the lakes—entities so familiar and thus often overlooked. By decentralizing human beings and imagining our familiar city through these unfamiliar lenses, I invite you to expand your sphere of perceptions and challenge our human limitations. When you think of Syracuse’s history, think of the long stretch of time scored in its geology, and the abundance of life living in the lakes, land, and air. Let these stories lead you into the perspectives of the forgotten, the marginalized, the misunderstood, the less heard, and the often dismissed.
Lastly, in the “cabinet of footnotes” at the end of this storybook, I explored an alternative method to catalog research. This walk-in storybook is supported by invaluable research done by community members, scholars, historians, activists, and scholars of Syracuse. It is not enough to credit them as mere references as they have laid the groundwork for this important story. I hope opening the drawers in this cabinet can be an engaging experience that brings joy to the discovery of academic sources, and shines light on ongoing local struggles and activism. All references in the cabinet are annotated with a summary that seeks to make the material accessible to as many readers as possible, especially as we confront Syracuse’s legacy of exclusion.
Ultimately, I hope this walk-in storybook introduces a greater sense of empathy into today’s increasingly divided world. Knowing all the violence and injustice in our broken world, I want us also to believe in reciprocity, resilience, and reclamation, to have hope, and spread love. Hence the title of this exhibition. Our hope is grounded in a sober understanding of the cycles of violence in our world, but propelled by the conviction that the dead of winter will give rise to the invincible summers within us.
1 Cicada’s Story
In the many dark years that I lived in the embrace of this dark, moist ground, I had a lot of time to ponder. What is the soil made of? As I burrowed toward the light across strata, I saw blood, sweat, and wreckage of demolished homes. Who do these belong to and where are they from? How did they get entrenched and buried in my soil? I need to find out before summer comes.
In this story, you will walk and read and observe. The cicada will lead you through a short journey as you piece together the puzzle. The journey prompts you to question the things we often take for granted: who built our city? Who was erased or exiled in the process? What did this empty parking lot used to be? Who paved the roads and who was displaced?
2 Dandelion’s Story
We are constantly ripped up from our land and apart from our kin. We drift; we are carried by wind, birds, human hands. We root; we give and nourish and make kins everywhere we go. We have no home, but everywhere is home. We tell a story of dislocation and the bonds of kinship.
In this story, you will sit down and watch. Set within an abandoned, overgrown kitchen, this storybook installation houses the lingering memory of a dandelion plant, a silent witness to the life and history on her patch of land.
Dandelions were introduced to North America by European settlers during the early colonial, and they were brought over for their practical uses as food and medicine, as well as a nostalgic reminder of “home” for the settlers. As we all know, dandelions are remarkably resilient plants: as they were transplanted to North America, they adapted quickly and continued to improve the local ecology by providing nectar to pollinators, aerating the soil with their deep roots, and enriching the earth by breaking up compacted soil and drawing up essential nutrients. Yet, ironically, the dandelions’ vigorous growth led many to see them as weeds, leading to their violent and widespread removal. What would the dandelions think as they watch the same story unfold on a much larger scale in the homes of the former 15th Ward?
Photographer: Qianzhen Li
Young audience featured in photos:
Jamie, MJ, Noor
3 Lake’s Story
They colonized me and possessed me as property. Yet I love you all: crayfish and catfish and ospreys and starlight and clouds and willow trees and humans and buttonbushes alike. Come sit with me and listen to my stories: the sound of cells splitting, wind breathing life, mercury buried, toxic chemicals dumped, and new lives birthing inside my body.
The final story, this time told by a magical lake, explores themes of life, nature, and land ownership against the familiar backdrop of colonization, industrialization, and environmental extraction. The installation is designed as an open book with a turning page, simultaneously revealing two stages of the lake’s memory. As you “turn the page” by walking from one side into the other, you will hear the lake’s soft whisper coming from the pages. Here, you will sit down and listen, move and discover. In this story, the generous lake can breathe life into water and air, nurturing all forms of aquatic and terrestrial creatures. However, as industries started invading her body, it has lost its ability to bring life into this world. The story imagines the lake’s quest to understand this loss, and her journey to reconcile with the past and reclaim her power.
Photographer: Qianzhen Li
Young audience featured in photos:
Jamie, MJ, Noor
Photographer: Qianzhen Li
Young audience featured in photos:
Jamie, MJ, Noor
I am boundlessly grateful for this year of research and teaching at Syracuse Architecture, made possible by the Harry der Boghosian Fellowship. I would like to thank my mentors and colleagues at Syracuse University, especially Michael Speaks, Eliana Abu-Hamdi, and Kyle Miller for their generous support throughout this year. I am thankful for every story and life that inspired my exhibition. I want to offer special thanks to Aryan Ambani ’25, Karen Villacis ’25, and James Barbier ’25, the exhibition production team; Michael Giannattasio and John Bryant, the fabrication shop; Andy Molloy, Daryl Olin, and Christopher Cavino, the technology support. It was also a truly humbling experience to teach and learn from the students of Syracuse Architecture. They have given me courage and innumerable ideas that led to this exhibition. Thank you.
Christina Chi Zhang
Syracuse Architecture
Harry der Boghosian Fellow 2023–24
Photographer: Qianzhen Li