These words amplify the urgings of young artists: that we make art that pertains to our lives in the world, that we declare injustice with pubic art, and that we tell and retell stories of past and present that contest colonialism and all its boundaries.

MWP artist researcher Ammarah Syed reminds us that “Communities have always known what to do to help themselves. They just need access to tools and resources.”

Artist researchers explored artistic practice and production in the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown in Toronto, surfacing their intentions and desires for community, culture and place. Some of the first works included survival tote bags containing seedlings designed by artist researcher Bert Whitecrow, encouraging self-sustainability during this seemingly apocalyptic time, with art that moves us beyond capitalism. Artist researcher Jess De Vitt followed her curiosity about dandelions, from their colonial dismissal as an invasive weed, through to Indigenous uses as medicine and food. This collaboration with dandelions led to deeper inquiry into mutual aid, collective care and food justice initiatives with BIPOC leadership. See the resulting community receipt zine Cooking for Community.

Ethical relations with Self, Land, and Community were active threads weaving through discoveries made in solo art practices, shared in weekly zoom sessions throughout the summer of 2020. Then in early fall we took the leap into experiments with production, communicating our ideas in downtown Toronto public sites like The Bentway, Queen Street West, Artscape Youngplace and Yonge Dundas Square.

Making With Place engaged predominantly QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour), young emerging artists who identify with past or current lived experiences of systemic and societal oppressions and repressions. Through research-creation processes exploring the complexities of place from their individual and diverse perspectives, this work coincided with the radical transformation of personal and public space mandated by public health orders to contain the spread of COVID-19. These sudden restrictions were felt acutely by all, but differentially impacted vulnerable peoples already navigating the challenges of marginalization. Adding to this awareness of inequity, the project transpired during a period of growing attention, awareness, activism and organizing to address anti-Black racism and systemic police brutality, amplified with the murder of George Floyd in Minnieapolis, and numerous other unaccounted for losses and violence to Black lives.

Place is complex and multi-dimensional. Arts practice with place was revealed as Creating With Land, its physicality, horizons, forests, waters, skies, climates. All the elements that surround, infuse and move through us, as well as the multiple human and more-than-human stories.

Place as historical and current socio-political context further impacts our bodies, minds, and communities. These interconnected dynamics exposed how necessary it is to contend artistically, intellectually and somatically with its multiple meanings.

Making With Place highlighted arts as resistance and knowledge making with place and materiality, following or creating narratives (past and present), creating collective learning space, and powerfully (re)mapping new ideas and experiences into spaces and places.

Making with Place began with a virtually mediated creative practice space, and culminated in a series of socially distanced place-making public art installations. Artist researchers collectively and creatively responded to their personal experiences during this time of significant public and social upheaval to activate new spatiality in public space. Through these works artist researchers enacted collaborative research to create lasting change.

Actualizing and learning from research-creation can open possibilities and creative resistances for young artist researchers to inform and build dynamic and responsive social systems, and open pathways for knowledge mobilization and decision-making in community-university collaborations. The project offered community activist scholarship and called for accountability and responsibility of systems and institutions to change oppressive practices and language. Positioning young people as knowledge producers and culture makers, rather subjects of academic research and charity.

This work may be considered a kind of place-making, designed with the goal of providing a door for young artists to author themselves into the bigger human story as theorists, challenging fixed ideas through anti-hegemonic practice in research-creation, provoking the unlearning necessary to realize desired and much needed social and cultural shifts.

Making With Place uncovered intentions to transform community and culture, for collective liberation.