About

Black Cartographies is an evolving visual and research-based exploration of Black presence, place, memory and power.

Situated within the interdisciplinary field of Black geographies and working across photography, moving image, oral history, archival research, and mapping, Black Cartographies considers how geography, language, migration, community, and the histories embedded in the places we inhabit shape Black lives.

It begins from the understanding that space is never neutral. Cities, neighbourhoods, streets and landscapes are formed not only through architecture and geography, but through histories of movement, exclusion, belonging, resistance and everyday life.

Black Cartographies asks how Black communities make place within these conditions. It looks at the spaces where Black life becomes visible, where communities gather and sustain themselves, and where histories remain present even when their physical traces have disappeared.

Rather than producing a definitive map of Black experience, the project approaches mapping as an open and evolving practice. Photographs, conversations, testimony, archival material, sound, historical research and geographical information become different ways of locating experience and asking what conventional maps leave out.

The work moves between individual lives and larger structures of power: between the intimate and the geographical, between memory and territory, and between the places communities create for themselves and the political, economic and institutional forces that continue to shape those places.

Montréal is an important point of departure for this research, particularly through The Ground Beneath Us, an ongoing project exploring Black spaces across the city and the relationships between language, memory, everyday life, belonging and power.

But Black Cartographies extends beyond a single city. It provides a framework to bring together existing and future work on Black histories and geographies across Canada, Britain, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere.

At its centre is a simple question:

How do we understand a place differently when we engage with the people, memories and histories that conventional maps have often failed to record?