christinazhangchi@gmail.com
Storytelling, Memory-Making, and Healing through Architecture

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.