Our Home and Haunted Land: An Exploration of Space, Memory and Virtual Reality
is a linear virtual reality experience that examines the colonial histories embedded in the names of a number of Toronto spaces. It incorporates research-creation and decolonial methodologies to expose the violent legacy of the land with live on. The project uses virtual reality as a means to challenge what Sara Ahmed calls the “whiteness” of our societal and physical space by reinserting a simultaneously historical and futuristic Blackness in profound allyship with Indigeneity.
The project explores the following questions: how can immersive digital storytelling be used to decolonize space and embody history and memory? How can virtual space be used to visualize the cultural and historical relationship between physical spaces? The following tensions are at the core of this project: an “invisibilized” history that permeates the construction of our society; names that allude to a past that remains largely unknown; counter-archives that seek to tell stories that challenge the dominant history.