OCAD University Strategic Foresight and Innovation (SFI) alums are transforming historic cemeteries across the Greater Toronto Area into civic spaces where personal memory, public history, nature and change meet.
Yesterday. Today. Forever., created by Space for Grief and presented by Mount Pleasant Group as part of its 200th anniversary, reinvents ten historic cemeteries into a distributed living museum exploring memory, nature, Toronto’s history and the ways communities change over time. The project was created by OCAD U SFI alums Ziyan Hossain, Calla Lee and Fran Quintero Rawlings as part of Space for Grief, an arts-based initiative that designs public spaces for exploring individual and collective loss, joy and hope. They are also the co-founders of Toronto-based interdisciplinary studio Method Collective.
The project is installed at the Toronto Necropolis, Prospect Cemetery, Pine Hills Cemetery, York Cemetery, Beechwood Cemetery, Duffin Meadows Cemetery, Elgin Mills Cemetery, Meadowvale Cemetery and Thornton Cemetery. Flagship installations are located at Toronto’s historic Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
The three SFI alums led the project's creative direction, research, design and production, drawing directly on approaches developed through their studies in strategic foresight. Their work included designing a connected experience across 10 distinct sites, researching 200 years of changing remembrance practices and integrating historical, cultural, operational and community perspectives into a single public art experience.
For the alums, the commission also demonstrates how strategic foresight and systems thinking can inform public-facing creative work and help shape new ways for communities to engage with complex histories.
“This is more than art simply placed in cemeteries,” says Hossain. “These landscapes already hold personal memory, public history, nature, architecture and generations of care. Mount Pleasant Group invited us to treat its bicentennial not only as a retrospective, but as a public question: how do we carry memory forward?”
The project was supported by OCAD U faculty members and alums. Associate Professor Suzanne Stein and Associate Professor Dr. Peter Jones are advisors to Space for Grief, while alums Edmund Law and Elise Walton contributed to the production.
The collaboration builds on a longstanding relationship between Space for Grief and the OCAD U community. Since the initiative launched in 2018, its founders have co-facilitated workshops with SFI faculty, hosted Design with Dialogue sessions and collaborated with Associate Professor Stein’s Super Ordinary Lab.
At the Mount Pleasant and Prospect cemeteries, reclaimed doors from buildings across the GTA have been transformed into walk-through sculptures, inviting visitors to consider what is left behind and carried forward. At Toronto Necropolis, We Remembered the Monoliths combines sculptural forms, projected imagery and an original soundscape.
At York, Meadowvale and Thornton cemeteries, visitors can leave messages in Memory Gardens, where remembrance cards become part of collective artworks. At Pine Hills Cemetery, Murmuration uses translucent bird forms that appear to change colour as daylight shifts and visitors move through the installation.
Across all 10 sites, museum-style outdoor signage provides a self-guided journey through Toronto and the surrounding region, connecting archival photographs and historical timelines with stories of migration, architecture, public health, ecology and the city's continuing evolution.
Yesterday. Today. Forever. is on view across all 10 cemetery locations. More information about the project and its installations is available through the Space for Grief website.