The 2026 Toolkit for Today, organized in collaboration with the CCA’s Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Irene Chin, seeks to open questions and methodological explorations on the border between narrative filmmaking and architectural history. It situates participants within diegetic space, the fictional if material worlds captured, created and framed in support of filmic narratives. But it also aims to shift Toolkit participants’ perspective outside of the diegetic to its frictional boundaries to see how filmmakers navigate the empirical conditions of architecture, environment, atmosphere, and surface—to sites where historical time unfolds across diverse social and geopolitical settings.

It takes inspiration from the CCA’s recent main gallery exhibition, How Modern, and the commissioning of Beijing-based artist Wang Tuo to create filmic lived histories that interweave historical facts, cultural archives, fiction, and mythology into speculative narratives. Bringing together fact and fiction, personal and historical, in a narrative about love, architecture, and politics, Wang Tuo’s Intensity in Ten Cities reveals the tensions and layers that characterized architectural production in New China, and how its sites continue to frame collective memories and experiences today.

In conversation with guests, including Wang Tuo, the Toolkit for Today: The World as Film will open and follow questions such as: how does diegetic space, the fictional worlds built for and captured by film, project often contested architectural worlds and imaginaries? What can architectural historians and other researchers learn from understanding practices of material spatial projection and building, fictionalization, fake settings, and more generally the diegetic as a site of narrative immersion?

The 2026 Toolkit for Today holds the intention of immersing participants in the worlds created by and for narrative filmmaking. Stepping into material processes of location scouting, stage setting, and re-creation, it explores the slippages between the real, the historical, and the projected. It will suggest methodological means of treading the line between primary-source-based forms of historical inquiry and the intentional blurring of landscapes, architectural objects and other settings in narrative-driven filmmaking.

The week is structured by dialogues with creative workers in the film industry, including directors, directors of photography, and screenwriters, and research focused seminars with designers who position film as a tool of critical inquiry and pedagogy. The program extends over five days during the week of 13 July and is anchored by a public event on the evening of 16 July.

Contributors to the 2026 Toolkit for Today include Sharlene Bamboat, Laure Bourgault, Irene Chin, Ila Firouzabadi, Iuliia Glushneva, Matthew Kalil and collaborators, Iris Ng, Cinéma Public, Rafico Ruiz, and Wang Tuo.