Situated next door to the undeniably troubled Downtown Eastside, the residential neighbourhood of Strathcona is often considered similarly sketchy terrain. But for those who live and work in the area, it's also a vibrant, multicultural community with a rich history, and it's this aspect of urban life that will be on display on Friday and Saturday (July 24 and 25), when Media UnDefined presents Traces: Projecting Stories of Strathcona at three sites on or around the 400 block of East Hastings Street. The work will also be presented at Woodland Park as part of the Powell Street Festival on August 1. And in September, Traces will travel to community gathering places throughout the neighbourhood, including schools, libraries, and community centres.

The idea, says Traces coordinator Jaimie Robson, is to connect young Strathcona residents with some of their older neighbours, and then to bring the seniors' stories to life through video, animation, and shadow puppetry. “We're looking at kind of activating the Hastings Street corridor in a new way, by illuminating it through stories of that neighbourhood,” she explains.

Traces will quite literally illuminate the corner of Hastings Street and Jackson Avenue, where a vacant lot is going to be turned into an alfresco venue for animated projections. The faí§ade of the Chapel Arts building, a former funeral home at 304 Dunlevy Avenue, will serve as a screen for the project's video component. And the Patricia Hotel has turned over its storefront window at 403 East Hastings to shadow puppeteer Tamara Unroe and her young student interns, who've been collecting tales of Strathcona and creating photo-transparency puppets of the tellers.

“We did an evening at McLean Park where we set up a shadow screen and started playing with puppets using the sun as our light source,” Unroe says. “Through that, we met some people and asked them about the neighbourhood and if they'd mind being interviewed—and if they'd mind being photographed, so we could turn them into shadow puppets for our play. We've also met various people since then, some who've lived in the neighbourhood for a long time, and interviewed them about their experience of living in Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside.”

Those subjects include Chinese seniors, neighbourhood shopkeepers, amateur historians, and relatively recent arrivals to the area. Their observations range from the mundane to the controversial—one participant, for instance, believes that dust from redevelopment on East Hastings contributed to a rash of pneumonia-like deaths in the Downtown Eastside. But the political and documentary aspects of the Traces project, though important, are secondary to its artistic side.

“The whole thing will be like a layered light painting,” says Unroe of her team's contribution, “and then the soundscape is layered as well, with people's voices and sound effects and music.

“When you ask people about their neighbourhood or about their home, they kind of go into a dreamy state when they talk about it,” she adds. “I guess because, often, people are talking about the past.”

One of the present-day benefits of the project is that Traces offers a benign alternative to what usually happens on Hastings Street after dark. Another is the pride that its young participants now take in their much-misunderstood home.

“It's a neighbourhood that often gets very particular media attention,” says Robson, choosing her words carefully. “And what I've seen so far is that the youth are discovering something quite different from what they anticipated. Although they live in the neighbourhood, there are parts of the neighbourhood that perhaps they don't venture to very often. And through this project we've really been encouraging them to explore their own neighbourhood, to get to know their own neighbours, and to talk to people that they might not typically engage in conversation with.”

The result, she hopes, will be a more neighbourly neighbourhood—and two stimulating nights of outdoor art.