How can 200 Strangers Create Collective Identity?
Ark: In Search of Surrender is a participatory, creative experiment that tests how somatic awareness, unscripted performance, and spatial design can forge vulnerability and collective identity among 200 strangers in Toronto.
In an ever-expanding digital culture starved for genuine closeness and embodied experience, Ark: In Search of Surrender conjures secular sanctuaries that demand presence, choice, and transformation. As our awareness of interdependence with one another and with nature increases, the need for modes of communication and self-expression which preserve the truth of personal and communal identity becomes ever more urgent.
Rooted in African and diasporic understandings of ritual, Ark reimagined ceremony for a contemporary urban context. It asked whether space could help people feel part of something larger than themselves. Rather than treating architecture as a backdrop, the project explored how space can choreograph attention, emotion, memory, and social relation.
Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and Hariri Pontarini Architects.
Ark is a foundational project in Ikang’s philosophy.
CREDITS
Odudu Umoessien - Lead Designer & Creative Director
Dylan Moore - Fabricator/Sculptor
Verundah (Anoop Kaura, Harman Naaree) - Florists
Sewa - Musical Performer
Queenie Xu - Ceramicist
Rachel Hale - Producer & Facilitator
Firi Fombo - Producer
Fifo Adebakin - Photographer
Ali Elmoudia, Ediri Obor - Video Documentation
The Venue
Ark unfolded inside a former Buddhist temple in Toronto—a space chosen for its exposed wooden structure, cathedral-like ceiling, and quiet gravity. Across the city, former sacred sites, community halls, and underused institutions often carry a spatial authority that new construction struggles to replicate. By repurposing the temple’s Great Hall, its inherited atmosphere became a communal instrument: a room capable of holding reflection, repair, and connection without erasing the memory already embedded in its walls. In Ark, the building was not a backdrop—it was an active partner in the search for collective identity.
The Great Hall: Two Realms
The hall was divided into two connected realms: the Shrine and the Village.
The Shrine rose thirteen feet high and eight feet wide, set on a raised platform aligned with the hall’s stage and joined to it like an extension of the building’s spine. Its wooden body was formed by ten hand-carved, petal-like ribs, converging at the base and opening outward like a lotus in bloom—an emblem of purity and a symbol of parts becoming whole. Emerging from a soft mound of natural flora, the Shrine held a sculptural altar with a bowl of water used to anoint each Seed.
The Village served as the gathering space: an antechamber where guests assembled, settled, and prepared to begin. A clear path linked the Village to the Shrine, lined with sculptural vessels. Each vessel held a Seed—a planter cradling a seedling—carried like a quiet promise.
The Journey
To reach the Shrine, participants climbed the venue’s stage and stepped onto the platform before arriving at the altar. The ascent transformed the building itself into a vessel—both a physical route and a symbolic passage toward collective identity. Guests were invited to bring a small personal artifact imbued with meaning—something simple and intimate, like a keychain or photograph—to offer to the occasion.
The Ritual
The ritual began when live music drew nine participants into a spontaneous gathering at the centre of the Village, encircled by other guests. From there, a procession formed and moved toward the Shrine as the remaining guests rose to their feet, bearing witness.
At the altar, each participant:
selected a Seed,
spoke a blessing over their offering,
placed their artifact into a vessel in exchange for the Seed,
and anointed the Seed with water drawn from the Shrine—an act echoing cycles of care, nurture, and becoming.
The journey then returned to the Village, where blessings, voiced and heartfelt, met each Seed alongside the performer’s steady melody. This sequence repeated until everyone had completed the exchange, culminating in a final musical offering that sealed the space as both artwork and rite.
Reflections & Release
Immediately after, the room transitioned into open conversation. Guests shared what they felt—quiet reflection, visible emotion, and, for some, tears. For a moment, the communal acts produced a palpable solidarity: a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. For those who joined the procession, the gaze of the assembled community felt like a supportive force, gently propelling them forward.
Yet others expressed unease with the intensity of the atmosphere—its closeness to religion. That tension became part of the experiment’s truth. What Ark revealed was not consensus, but a threshold: a participatory experience that could inspire belonging and also resistance, illuminating both the potency and the risk of ritual in a plural public.
Designing for that range of response was a central to the challenge. The experience needed to remain spontaneous and affecting, yet open enough to welcome multiple cultural and spiritual backgrounds. This was addressed by introducing the work’s sensory cues for action in an interpretive space before guests entered the Great Hall—preparing participants for a bodily encounter, setting expectations without prescribing belief, increasing ease, consent, and engagement. Just as importantly, the ritual concluded with an open conversation where emotion and discomfort could be voiced rather than concealed, allowing the audience to name their reactions, negotiate difference in real time, and leave with a shared ethic of listening even when their interpretations diverged.
At the same time, the work had to remain legible at the scale of 200 participants—readable from every vantage point while still enabling intimacy. This was achieved through a strong central axis and clear circulation between Village and Shrine. The Shrine’s porosity and alignment with the existing stage made each participant’s ascent and actions visible across the room, allowing the ritual to be understood in real time as a collective event—while preserving the moment as private vulnerability held inside a public act.
The experiment leaves us with more questions than answers about how communal identity can be instilled in contemporary society. If our deepest drives—fear, longing, trauma, the need to be seen —have not changed, what might we learn from earth-based ritual practices that have held communities together for generations? Given the shared lineage of ritual and architecture, what would it mean to reintegrate ritual intelligence into public space, not as performance, but as quiet structures that invite strangers into care, mutual responsibility, and belonging? If spatial design, paired with carefully composed communal acts, can create the conditions for introspection and vulnerability, what is the architect’s role in contemporary society?
If architecture can become a vessel of emotional expression and shared action, strangers can momentarily relate as one. For a moment, 200 strangers in Toronto encountered themselves as interdependent with architecture not merely a container, but the instrument of a collective statement enacted by everyone present. If architecture and ritual can create the conditions for vulnerability and collective identity, then the architect’s role may expand beyond optimizing function and form toward choreographing ethical encounters: designing quiet frameworks that help strangers practice mutual responsibility and remember what it means to belong.
As part of the programming of the project, Hariri Pontarini Architects hosted Odudu and the key collaborators of the project where they shared an intimate discussion about our creative journey behind this immersive experience, blending music, art, and architecture to explore the potential for community healing and connection.
