On the night of October 4 to 5, the historic Canada Malting Silos, standing sentinel on Toronto’s waterfront, will be transformed into a moving canvas of light, dance, and water. Presented by OCAD U’s Global Centre for Climate Action in partnership with the Delegation of the European Union to Canada.

Responding to Nuit Blanche’s curatorial framework Poetic Justice, the piece envisions a renewed relationship with water based on reciprocity, reverence, and care – a dialogue between human gesture and the elemental forces that sustain life.

A weave of memory and future, where gesture becomes a wave dancing on the skin of architecture.

Imagine a dancer whose body does not merely move through space but becomes the driving force of a greater, ancestral energy. Every movement generates consequences that propagate beyond the boundaries of flesh: their gestures influence a virtual body of water that takes shape on the silos’ massive concrete surface, following its industrial lines, inhabiting its weathered cavities, transforming solid matter into a fluid, shifting mirror.

Water – symbol of life, memory, and transformation – becomes the medium through which past and future merge into a liquid, pulsating present. It is not just projection but living presence: it responds, reacts, remembers. It carries the memory of primordial oceans, of rains that carved mountains, of rivers that shaped civilizations. And now, on the skin of these industrial monuments, this memory meets the contemporary gesture, creating a dialogue between what has been and what may yet become.

The installation uses projection mapping to animate the silos, revealing a dancer’s movements that ripple across the concrete surface, creating waves that surge, dissolve, and re-form in an endless cycle. The traces of archaic dances are reflected in contemporary movements, as if the performer’s body contained echoes of forgotten rituals, of ancient celebrations tied to water’s natural cycles. The silos’ surface transforms into a vast liquid mirror, a reactive organism that responds to movement with its own luminous existence.