The Ground Beneath Us: Black Cartographies of Montréal is an interdisciplinary research and development project exploring Black space, belonging and self-determination across Montréal. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, this research period aims to investigate and develop new artistic and participatory approaches through photography, moving image, sound, oral history, archival research, and counter-cartographic mapping, rather than produce a predetermined or definitive body of work.

Building upon my earlier work in Little Burgundy, the project considers Black presence across Montréal as an archipelago of distinct but interconnected territories. These spaces are not defined simply by demographic concentration or geographical boundaries. They are produced through everyday life: through language, memory, migration, cultural practice, social relationships and repeated acts of occupation and belonging.

Central to the research is the question of who has the power to define space. Black communities can create places of intimacy, identity, protection and collective memory while remaining subject to decisions made elsewhere through planning, policing, property ownership, development, language policy and other structures of governance. The project approaches these tensions through the idea of incomplete sovereignty: spaces in which forms of Black self-determination and world-making coexist with external systems of power.

Language is particularly significant within Montréal. French, English, Creole, and other languages can operate as forms of connection, cultural inheritance, and passage, but also as boundaries that determine how individuals move through institutions, communities, and the city itself.

Rather than producing a definitive map of Black Montréal, this research asks what other forms of cartography become possible when mapping begins with lived experience. Participant-led walks, photographs, conversations, field recordings, archival material and personal geographies will be explored as ways of understanding how Black space is made, remembered and negotiated.

The research therefore functions as a space of experimentation. Different methods of image-making, listening, mapping, and collaboration will be tested to understand how they might operate individually and in relation to one another. The intention is not to determine the final form of the work in advance, but to let the research process, the people encountered, and the particularities of place inform how the project develops.

Through this process, The Ground Beneath Us considers Montréal not as a single Black geography but as a constellation of Black worlds, each shaped by different histories of migration, language, memory and belonging.

The research is guided by a larger question: if Black communities create territories of belonging and self-determination within the city, where do those territories begin and end, and who ultimately possesses the power to govern them?

Research and development in progress. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.