Type: Community, Cultural

Location: Toronto, Ontario.

Client: Black Lives Matter Canada

Area: 9,505  sq. ft. (883 sq. m.)

Status: In Progress

Photos: Jessie Lau, Alexa Del Sol

Trinidadian-Canadian poet and theorist M. Nourbese Phillip once wrote of maroonage as the “coming together of body, space and place”. Maroons, who were the fugitive slaves to have escaped the plantation, were the ones that paved the way for an otherwise. Holding strong to the notion that life cannot solely be prison, they ran for the mountains, they ran for and with the Earth, in order to seek a life created through practice and community. Maroons are a testament to the fact that black bodies within the diaspora have and continue to create spaces within the limitations of colonial history that seek to represent an alternative vision of freedom. This space becomes an oppositional geography to the outside forces of white supremacy, and instead through guidance, will, hope and the practical matter of ‘dreaming’—the fugitive black body continues to map out routes of escape, plot land, claim place and reclaim the body as a site of healing and reconstruction for a liberatory future. 

Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism becomes an architectural representation of maroonage. The “coming together” of  black resistance, healing, protest and community birthed by the activists of Black Lives Matter - Canada. ‘Wildseed’ embodies a new type of architecture that holds both the rebellion and creation of black life and black community in Canada. The research and design for the new centre is grounded in a decolonial methodology that brings together Black feminist infrastructural guidance; pre-colonial African ways of being and building; and ecological sustainability.

1 From M. NourbeSe  Philips, A Genealogy of Resistance, 267, summarised in ‘The Fugitive Handbook’. Electric maroonage–a group of “Black, brown, queer, writers, artists (who have) decided to plot points across their escape matrix”.