The house of the unknown artist and the cosmopolitan imagination of urban memory

Abstract

This article returns to a diverse body of literature that has identified urban memory as a specific category of cultural analysis. Yet, while the significance of memory to culture and the city is widely recognized, at the same time, more and more questions are surfacing around the status and meaning of the term urban. This article pursues the contemporary question of urban memory by turning to alternative urban cultural practices – specifically, urban intervention art projects – that elaborate upon the social imagination, settings and scenes of urban memory. The case study for this article concentrates on Toronto-based artist Iris Häussler’s The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach, 2006, a project that convincingly staged the discovery of an unknown reclusive artist’s house and presented it to the public as a legitimate municipal archival assessment. This project examines the production of archival knowledge and urban memory through invention, performance and participation, and places memory at the crossroads of global city aspirations and rapid gentrification in downtown Toronto. This article will argue that this fabricated urban archive presents a number of archival lessons and houses a creative cosmopolitanism that asks us to identify with the life of a stranger. By placing The Legacy in dialogue with recent perspectives on the cosmopolitanism imagination, I will argue for the significance of not just imagination but memory to a reinvented, embedded cosmopolitanism that grows out of both ambivalence and reciprocity within the urban everyday.