A Settler’s Land Acknowledgement - Public Space is Colonized Space
As a settler and student of decolonization, I made this project as an exercise in rhetorically destabilizing the notion of the “public" as a colonial affectation that presupposes safety and comfort for settlers, while being built upon conquest and displacement. As a graphic designer and educator, my intent is to explore the extent to which words and claims matter, and to indict visualization and inscription as instruments of colonial/ism/ity.
The project started as a reflection on the occluded relationship between The Bentway and Fort York, in Tkaronto. It is a working acknowledgement whose main ambition is to frame as contingent and contestable that which is thought to be natural and established: To charge the coloniality of notions like the “public” as violent and perhaps apocalyptic, and to provoke both critical reflection and defection amongst the beneficiaries of settler colonialism.
