[Communities] A New Salon Celebrating Memory, Music and Meaning

The cello's final note lingered in the room before fading into silence.

For a moment, no one spoke. Around tables and chairs casually arranged facing the projector, people seemed reluctant to break the stillness.

Then, when the organizers invited participants to share their reflections on the evening, a woman stood up.

"The moment I heard it, I started to cry," she said.

Her words came softly, but they shifted the atmosphere in the room. The music had stirred something unexpected – a memory, perhaps or a feeling difficult to name.

Around her, nearly 50 people sat with pens in hand, writing in the notebooks provided by the organizers. Some paused mid-sentence, others looked up from their pages to listen. Tea cups rested on nearby tables as the rustle of paper replaced the glow of phone screens.

But this was more than an intimate evening of music and reflection. It was the opening of a new cultural salon series in Shanghai.

The gathering was the first edition of Echoes of Nostalgia, an interdisciplinary salon organized by TIBA, a Shanghai-based cultural initiative co-founded by Dr Federica Signorini and writer and cultural scholar Dr Sergio Salazar. The event brought together live music, poetry and a participatory creative workshop to explore a theme both personal and universal: nostalgia.

It also marked the beginning of a recurring salon series designed to bring together artists, thinkers and residents for intimate conversations around art, memory and creativity – something increasingly rare in a city where connection is often shaped by work, speed and professional circles.

A month later, TIBA announced its second event, The Stories We Wear, inviting participants to arrive wearing an outfit, accessory or piece of jewelry that held personal meaning. The theme shifted from nostalgia to identity, but the purpose remained the same: creating a community where strangers could connect through stories rather than small talk.

TIBA takes its name from an ancient practice of annotating paintings across time and place – a dialogue between viewers and artworks that the studio reimagines as collaborative spaces where stories, art and conversation unfold across cultures.

A City of Movement, A Theme of Return

The timing of the event was intentional. The salon took place shortly after Spring Festival – the largest annual human migration in the world – when millions travel back to hometowns before returning to cities like Shanghai.

"A lot of you have gone back home," Signorini told the audience in her opening remarks. "A lot of you have come back."

In Shanghai, this rhythm is familiar. Many residents have arrived from somewhere else – another province, another country, another language – bringing memories of other homes while building new ones in the city.

Salazar framed the theme in a sentence that quietly shaped the evening's conversation.

"Nostalgia is the way in which we contend with change."

Rather than simply longing for the past, nostalgia reflects the tension between memory and movement – the way people interpret who they are becoming as their lives unfold across different places.

When Music Meets Poetry

The evening opened with Colombian cellist Michael Smith Sánchez Ramírez performing pieces by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, interwoven with literary readings by Salazar.

"When they proposed nostalgia," Ramírez said later, "so many things came to my mind."

For him, the feeling carries a contradiction.

"It's something painful in terms of the soul," he explained. "But it also makes you happy. It's like a juicy pain – a pain that somehow you enjoy, but only after the process."

His reflections echoed the emotional landscape explored in Salazar's reading.

After performing Borges' poem Las calles ("The Streets"), Salazar presented a short story written for the evening. The story follows a woman who discovers a torn photograph from a family gathering: a long wooden table built by her grandfather, relatives laughing in the sunlight.

"The missing piece wasn't lost," Salazar read. "She had ripped it herself. The way memory does – cutting out what we cannot bear to see."

The missing fragment was the grandfather's chair.

He had died that winter.

"She often said she left home for opportunity," the story continued. "But it became clear she had left because it hurt to stay."

As the words settled in the room, the cello returned quietly, echoing the emotional shift in the narrative.

"It's not just about the words," Ramírez later reflected. "It's how you interpret them."

"It's how you interpret them."

The performance unfolded as a dialogue between music and literature – two art forms exploring the same emotional terrain.

Creativity as Practice

At the beginning of the evening, each participant received a notebook prepared for the salon, containing excerpts, translations and prompts that encouraged them to follow the performances while adding their own reflections.

Soon the notebooks filled with handwritten notes.

After the performances, participants were invited to identify an "object of nostalgia" and explore it creatively.

"Art, music and creative writing, people often think you are born with them," Salazar told the room. "That is not true. You can learn how to create."

Signorini connected the exercise to a broader cultural moment.

"We live in a world of constant scrolling and notifications," she said. "Sometimes that noise leaves us feeling disconnected – from ourselves and from each other."

Spaces like the salon attempt to counter that rhythm. For a few hours, the room moved at a different pace: people writing by hand, listening carefully, and speaking to strangers they had just met.

Phones remained out of sight as conversations unfolded across the room, shifting naturally between English and Chinese.

Personal Stories in a Shared Room

As participants began sharing their reflections, the atmosphere became more intimate.

Joy, who has lived in Shanghai for more than a decade, chose something simple: a photograph of a tree from her hometown in Guangxi.

"It's a very old tree," she said. "Before, it was not so beautiful."

For years the tree had simply been part of the landscape outside her home. But last year her grandmother passed away, and the image of the tree took on a new meaning.

Now, she explained, especially in winter when its branches are bare, the tree reminds her of her grandmother – and of the quiet moments she once spent looking at it from home.

Across the table, Olive reflected on nostalgia in another way.

The 26-year-old, originally from Hong Kong, moved to Shanghai last year after graduating from the University of Hong Kong in environmental science. After several years living abroad – first in Australia and now in Shanghai – distance has changed the way she thinks about home.

She had come to the salon looking for connection.

"I wanted to join some activities in English," she said. "And meet new people."

But as the evening unfolded, the theme of nostalgia became more personal.

When asked what nostalgia meant to her, her answer came quickly.

"That will always be my home – my family."

Living away from them, she explained, had made those bonds feel stronger rather than weaker.

"I love them deeply," she said. "They always support me and visit me wherever I am."

For Olive, nostalgia was not tied to a city or a place, but to the people who made home feel stable across distance.

By the end of the evening, she said the experience had surprised her.

"I gained energy from the interactions."

Another participant, Zeyang, 34, said he attended after seeing the event advertised online and becoming curious about the concept.

He admitted that nostalgia was not something he personally thought about often. In Chinese, he explained, the word itself feels formal – something more likely to appear in literature than in everyday conversation.

What stood out to him instead was the atmosphere of the room: strangers speaking openly about family, memory and loss with unusual honesty.

"Everyone respects each other," he said. "It's still a good feeling."

He felt the event reflected a side of Shanghai that is often harder to find in daily life – a slower, more reflective space, particularly for the city's international and English-speaking communities. For him, the evening was less about nostalgia itself and more about seeing how conversation could create a sense of connection between strangers.

Nostalgia as Shared Reflection

The second salon, The Stories We Wear, builds directly on that foundation. With only 20 seats available, participants were asked to bring something personal to wear – a ring, a necklace, a jacket, a pair of shoes – and the story attached to it.

The idea reflects what TIBA is becoming: not simply an event series, but a recurring community where people can slow down, reflect, and connect across cultures through art and storytelling.

In Shanghai – a city where many lives unfold between hometowns, languages and shifting identities – nostalgia often carries more than simple longing. It becomes a way of holding together different chapters of a life lived across places.

During the salon, that process unfolded quietly around the room. Pens moved across notebooks, memories surfaced through music and poetry, and participants shared stories that linked distant landscapes to their present lives in the city.

By the end of the evening, nostalgia had become more than the theme of the gathering – it had become the language through which strangers turned memory into community. In a city that rarely slows down, TIBA offers something increasingly rare: a space to pause, reflect, and be seen beyond the surface.

How Can I Join?

For the next TiBa event, follow their WeChat account for updates. Their next event will be landing in June.