Black Canadian scholars have long asserted Toronto as a forgotten site, framed as devoid of Blackness and Black livabilities. This Black feminist pedagogical project asserts “memory [is] an important tool in holding on to cultural roots, making sense of the journey from birth home to Canada” (Silvera 2005, 16).

Memory and Place-Making, a collaboration with Abdi Osman, maps African communities in the city of Toronto by working with students, artists, and community members to co-create a visual archive of Toronto that documents Somali women's and family experiences in and of the city. 

This mapping-memory project ruptured the “absent presence” of Black life historically to the present, inserting Somali, Nigerian, Eritrean, Jamaican, and Ethiopian (for example) lives into Toronto’s past and present. We interviewed ten women, photographed ten sites, invited community members to document their own sites and sounds, and generated a textual and visual archive on community-specific ‘landing’ or (un)settlement practices in settler colonial contexts like Toronto, Canada.

Check out the interactive map here.