I am sitting on a couch in Toronto, looking at garbage trucks in Taipei.
“Not all spaces are places…we know a place like we know a person,” says Dr. Nicholas D. Bowman on a YouTube livestream, accompanied by the twinkling sounds of a nighttime ritual. Bowman is sharing video footage where people rush around the trucks with their trash, while ‘A Maiden’s Prayer’ plays, alerting them to the pickup.
“Not being from the area, this was a bit of a haunting experience,” he says. “I would just hear, 9 o’clock at night, people scurrying in the streets with their garbage, running past the trucks. What it came to be was how I met my neighbours.”
This mundane chore helped him begin to experience Taipei as a place, not a space, when he lived there in January 2020. When the COVID pandemic began Bowman had to leave Taiwan. Now when he hears that song, it brings up a sense of loss for his time there.
I am meant to be attending this talk in person in Montreal, as part of Love & Loss: Nostalgia Symposium and Research Showcase. Instead, family circumstances have brought me home to Toronto, in my mom’s new and unfamiliar apartment, sitting on a couch we’ve had since I was ten.
I think about how the couch is beginning to rip. My mom mentioned it’s time to get rid of it, and I felt a knee-jerk reaction of internal protest. The couch, I realize, is a remnant of the home we sold in 2016, a place I can never get back. Whether or not it’s a functional couch, it’s now an object of my nostalgia, not unlike the tinny audio from Taipei.
This is the third edition of Nostalgia/Lostagain, a symposium designed to induce such personal revelations.
I mean that literally. The symposium is organized by a research collective called the Nostagain Network, a group of Concordia students who have designed the symposium with deep care and intention, transforming Concordia’s 4TH SPACE venue in the process.
The collective came together in 2022, when founder and Sociology PhD student Richy Srirachanikorn attended a talk by scholar Katharina Niemeyer, positioning nostalgia as a phenomenon that brings people together.
Srirachanikorn was researching loneliness in digital worlds and had always thought of nostalgia in negative terms – a kind of regression, a longing for a reactionary past. This alternative framing sparked a desire to probe further, alongside others.
He brought that framing to Milieux’s TAG cluster, where he found interest in a possible themed event. A small group formed, taking inspiration from the Speculative Life cluster’s annual symposium.
Two themes emerged in their ideation process: encouraging traditional academic inquiry into nostalgia as a disembodied concept; and engaging with nostalgia through an embodied, interactive emphasis on art and creation. The question became how to fuse the two.
Speaking after this year’s symposium, Srirachanikorn tells me that part of the answer is in the physical design of the space. The group’s goal is always for 4TH SPACE not to look like itself.
This year Nostagain added an arch at the entrance to the room, so that as soon as symposium participants stepped inside, they would shift into an inquisitive mindset.
“You can see their curiosity,” he says. “Like, what’s this?”
As they moved through the room, participants would encounter a seated section for panel presentations and a series of research-creation installations. The arch also doubled as a grassy garden wall dotted with origami roses, designed by collective member Annie Harrisson.
Those roses featured the nostalgic reflections of symposium participants, written down throughout the day and folded into flowers. The roses were meant to symbolize the trickiness of nostalgia: do you preserve them in their folded beauty, or do you open them up to see the contents inside, risking ugliness?
If I had been there in person, I might have written my couch revelation on a rose. Then again, I might not have even had the revelation.
The symposium organizers have just published a paper about this process in the International Journal on Stereo & Immersive Media. Titled Designing for Meaning, the paper lays out the collective’s iterative approach to event design.
Humanities PhD student Rowena Chodkowski, the first author on the paper, tells me that their design approach centres on meaningful methods. “Rather than think about just the output, think about how meaning is created. How do we design to create meaning in the people who attend?”
The first edition of the symposium, in 2022, was held in a different space, with separate rooms for panels and workshops. That led to a bottleneck in between presentations, which wasn’t conducive to spontaneous conversations and connections, and saw a drop in attendance for the creative workshops.
So, the collective re-designed for the following year, moving to 4TH SPACE and prioritizing flow. Now, research creation and panel presentations happen all in the same room, with a dedicated hour for participants to peruse the creative projects.
The paper — which Chodkowski wrote alongside Nostagain members Srirachanikorn, Harrisson, Derek Pasborg and Shahrom Ali — cites scholar and artist Raul Gschrey’s work on research-creation in academia. Gschrey writes that combining creative and traditional academic methods can create a polyphonic experience – “a less hierarchical and a more open-ended and associative occupation with topics, ideas, and artifacts.”
Many conferences lack the facilities required to incorporate research-creation, often relegating it to a gallery space separate from talks and panels.
Given that Milieux already fosters alternative practices, the collective was emboldened to try something different. “Breaching decorum was not an obstacle to our event design process,” they write.
This year’s research-creation presentation at Love & Loss resembled a farmer’s market, inviting attendees to walk through and speak to the artists. That sense was even conveyed virtually, via a half-hour walk-through guided by Srirachanikorn himself.
Creative projects ranged from Marie Khediguian’s oil paintings inspired by family photographs and the legacy of the Armenian genocide; to Kamyar Karimi’s audio-video installation working with his mother’s poetry; to perfumes and soundscapes of a remembered island, a collaborative project between LeParc’s Malte Leander, perfumer Yosh Han and scientist Julia Kubanek.
Geneviève Moisan of Milieux’s Textiles & Materiality cluster presented a miniature living room titled Echoes of Play. The scene was inspired by Moisan’s history of gaming with her father, who had just passed away.
Alongside a miniature couch and TV, she included tiny electrical cords, plugged into nothing, running off into the massive white space surrounding her scene. That disconnection, cords feeding into absence, said more than the furniture itself.
Grief can be a deeply lonely experience.
Nostalgia and its attendant sense of loss are always personal and often alienating; no one shares your exact embodied relation to the nostalgic object. But the act of expressing nostalgia – and, in the case of the Nostagain Network, the act of studying it – can be a foundation for community.
“I’ve never felt lonely doing this,” Srirachanikorn says, about the symposium. He knows that graduate conferences, especially those mandated by departments, can be isolating for the students who organize them.
Nostagain, though, emerged out of desire, not obligation. The collective grew out of a shared spark into a network that today counts 60 members.
Katharina Niemeyer, whose work inspired the symposium, now supports it through her International Media Nostalgia Network. The symposium receives funding from the Dean’s Special Initiative, Faculty of Arts and Science, and the Concordia Council on Student Life.
Nostagain is student-run, but Srirachanikorn emphasizes that the university framework made it possible for the collective to try things out and take initiative.
“The support we’ve received from Milieux is something that I didn’t know grad school could be like,” he adds.
That doesn’t mean the experience has been without challenges.
“It has been amazing and also slightly exhausting,” Chodkowski reflects. She says the group has grown both intellectually and from a professional perspective, learning how to do outreach, newsletter production, video production, curation and more.
Nostagain’s success, Chodkowski thinks, comes from the collective’s diversity. Members bring different research interests and professional expertise, coming from disciplines like studio arts, education, anthropology and communications, and tackling problems together. (Love & Loss, Chodkowski adds, went much more smoothly than she anticipated.)
I ask how Nostagain has impacted her personally. She says the community and camaraderie has been invaluable.
“The real symposium was the friends that we made along the way,” she jokes.
The topic almost counterintuitively lends itself to building intimacy. Nostalgia seems like a bittersweet subject, but participants build positive associations with loss by working on it together.
Across the three years of the symposium, Srirachanikorn has been able to watch participants develop their intellectual inquiry alongside their interpersonal relationships. That continuity has encouraged him to think of nostalgia as something productive, even generative.
“The impact of this generative nostalgia is evident with the artists themselves or the panelists –they come back and they say, ‘oh my gosh, since last year, I’ve written more, I explored more, I’ve created more, and it actually made me deal with this thing that I had.”
That thing might be a box of photos in the attic, or perhaps a tattered piece of furniture.
“It’s so refreshing to meet people again and see that change embodied,” he adds.
I ask if he’s noticed that happening at all with his own nostalgia. “I have,” he answers, before taking a moment.
“My dad taught me how to play,” Srirachanikorn continues. “When he passed when I was younger, I buried myself in schoolwork so I didn’t have to deal with it. And I thought that was the end of it.”
“It wasn’t – the carpet rots eventually.”
Now, Srirachanikorn has dug up his old journals and music that helped him deal with the loss at the time, using them as inspiration to write new pieces that he plans to record. He will present those recordings at an upcoming Nostagain event in May, Spring Into Nostalgia!, in collaboration with UQAM.
“We’ll present it at this event to kind of finally let the grief grow, you know, because it’s been growing in the wrong direction for a long time,” he explains. It took three years of encountering others’ grief through the Nostalgia Symposium to take this step.
“The relief already of knowing that this will happen, the process of going through it, having an event and knowing the support that would be there to let it out, to let the grief grow, has just unloaded so much in here,” he adds.
“There’s a purpose to it because you know that at the end there’s a community of others waiting.”
That relationship between the individual and the community is at the core of Nostagain.
Even as nostalgia feels deeply personal, it always bumps up against the backdrop of collective experience and historical context.
In his time at Concordia and with Nostagain, Srirachanikorn’s research has shifted. Moving away from loneliness, he now focuses on nostalgia as it is experienced and used by people who are homebound – particularly as a rejoinder to narratives that equate staying inside with laziness or uselessness.
Before his PhD, Richy saw sociological phenomena as an expression of or reaction to a social problem. “The symposium kind of cracked the shells of that sociological thinking,” he says. Now he’s more interested in the relation between the micro and the macro. “It’s as if the thing that you’re looking at here holds both the tension of an individual biography but also the cultural history,” he adds.
Or, as the collective writes in their forthcoming paper: “Nostalgia operates as a boundary object where personal and collective memory overlap.”
That overlap also creates a space of possibility, where some future-oriented desire might emerge.
Chodkowski, whose research focuses on niche web aesthetics and longing for lost futures, sees nostalgia as a key lens for making sense out of the current poly crisis.
“Nostalgic is a mimetic process in which you take in information from the world. It leaves an impression on you and then you go out and you act in the world,” she muses. “It’s this process through which you negotiate your relationship internally, and sometimes subconsciously, sometimes affectively, between the world that you know and the world that you experience and the world that you would like to be.”
Nostalgia, then, has political potential. Not just in the way it’s often equated with reactionary propaganda, but as a base from which we can imagine utopian futures built on collective feeling.
“One of the things that’s reconstituting this very essential human desire to connect with each other, is […] these objects of nostalgia that connect our life worlds in a very potent, embodied, remembered way,” she says. “And I think that’s something that, let’s say, Donald Trump’s fascist propaganda can’t do.”
Nostagain makes room for people to build organic connections that pull at the edges of nostalgia’s resonances, situating it as negotiated and always in tension, not over-determined like a campaign ad.
The Nostalgia Symposium brings scholars, artists and thinkers into a collective process of meaning-making, generating personal revelations and inter-personal relationships.
It turns 4TH SPACE into a place for attendees IRL and online, creating a communal experience that looks both longingly backward and hopefully ahead.
– Rosie Long Decter, Milieux Storyteller
