Tracing Traces: Noticing in the Minor Key of the Downwrong

A program of:
Little and Often

Saturday, June 13, 2026
1pm–3pm
Northern entrance of Philosopher’s Walk, Bloor St W

This session will unfold as a gradual, collective walk through the University of Toronto’s St. George campus guided by artists Shannon Garden-Smith and Laila Fox. The facilitators will share various stories and material lines of inquiry while inviting participants into exercises such as the creation of rubbings, tracings, and clay impressions that will allow us to deepen our pause and sensorial attunement.

Our route will be loosely structured by several anchor points: public un-monuments in the form of imprints on urban surfaces (for example, in sidewalk concrete and road paint). Traces of (more-than-)human, animal, plant, and machine contact with the city offer minor disruptions to the settler colonial logics of our paved-over world, creating tender depressions in which we might hold something other than dominant progress narratives.

We will seek to attune our attention, our noticing, differently, so that we might begin to sense differently. Disrupting what is ordinarily knowable in urban space, we will attend to what beings, forces, and histories are affirmed/effaced by the shape our relations take in the concrete-bounded environment.

Participants will gather at the north-most entrance to Philosopher’s Walk at Bloor Street West for 1pm, and will conclude near Robarts Library around 3pm.  

This walk is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

*A first iteration of this walk was convened with the support of Namara Projects. 

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Shannon Garden-Smith is an artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto of Scottish and Irish settler heritage. Garden-Smith is currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Art at York University, having previously earned an MFA at the University of Guelph and Honours BA at the University of Toronto. Primarily working across sculpture and installation, Garden-Smith engages with the mutability and poetics of the lithic environment. She seeks to unsettle naturalized relationships to its extraction, drawing on sand and stone’s ability to hold complex possibilities for time, memory, and different futures.

Laila Fox is interested in how invisibility limns urban ecologies. Working across the geographies and visual arts, she considers how what is knowable/believable/noticeable challenges and shapes socionatural relations in urbanized places. Fox lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and has been informed by the unceded lands and waters of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations (aka Vancouver), and where ‘the spawning stream’ meets the shore of the global petrochemical industry (aka Sarnia/Chemical Valley).