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Op-ed: With a new home, Black arts and radical creation is here to stay

Members of Black Lives Matter Canada

Black Lives Matter Canada launched the Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism at 24 Cecil on July 8, 2021. This 10,000-square foot Victorian building that once housed Gilda’s House and the Communist Party of Canada is now our permanent home.

The building is located in a hub that historically served the Black community in Toronto. It’s near the Ward community, which once housed the majority of Black people in Toronto. It’s up the street from the First Baptist Church of Toronto, which was established by formerly enslaved people. It’s down the street from the original meeting place for the first trans group in Canada, run by Rupert Raj in Tkaronto. The history of the neighbourhood solidified for us that this was the place for the Wildseed Centre.

The Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism is a vessel for change; it’s transfeminist, queer and trans-led, and is committed to creating and supporting Black liberation work across Canada. One of our biggest challenges when the movement began in 2014 was finding space and resources to support the sustainability of the work. We wanted and needed permanent space where we could nurture Black healing, and be more accessible to our community, as this was one of the major criticisms we received in our first couple of years of organizing.

The process of finding space was really a five-year dream and journey. We received several rejections from landlords. Many landlords were worried about the “negative environment” we might bring to a venue. For the past 2 years we have been renting a unit on Geary. Unfortunately the pandemic stopped our ability to hold anything more than our initial launch in the space before the city shutdown.

The 2020 uprisings saw a surge in activations across the country and the largest amount of donations to our movement ever. We saw this as an opportunity to finally provide to our communities the space we have all dreamed of in this city for so long. We chose the name Wildseed after our forebear Octavia Butler’s novel about immortal Africans who can inhabit other bodies. We wanted to encourage the belief that we can dream and shape our own futures outside of the experience we have been forced into.

Wildseed will be a community hub accessible to the Black community that will nurture Black, radical creation and that will unapologetically be a place for organizers, artists, families, survivors and comrades to find support. The building will house the offices of Black Lives Matter Canada and Black Lives Matter-Toronto, the Wildseed Black Arts Fellowship and a number of other artistic and educational programs. Inside is an accessible artists’ studio, meeting, rehearsal, recording, archival and educational space.

So often in this city and in this country, Blackness is monitored and dampened by the rules set by someone else’s vision, for whom making their own identity through proximity to Blackness is more important than solidarity. To that we say no more. We say no more to being priced out of space, opportunity, creativity and safety. We want those who come to the centre to feel like they were expected to show up and that the folks staffing the centre look like them. We don’t want another space where we as Black people have to edit ourselves to abide by the “expected ways of being.”

It’s incredibly exciting to offer room to support Black experimentation through our own programs as well as through partnerships with other groups and individuals. Through the support of individual donations and a generous grant from the BLM Global Network Foundation that’s restricted to the purchase of the building, we chose to buy the building outright. We didn’t want to be dependent on any funding arrangements that would restrict the type of creation and activity that can be developed in this space.

Wildseed Centre is so much more than a building. It’s a commitment to plant and grow the seeds of radical Black revolutions. This centre was birthed by Black Lives Matter Artivists hoping to build an enduring space for radical ideas, community shares, education, children and elders, the unhoused and underserved, and to affirm Black existence everywhere.

Wildseed is located in T’karon:to on Three Fires Territory and the territory of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum. This area is covered by Treaty 13. It is our duty to care for and nurture the land and acknowledge, honour and commit to being in right relations with her people; to walk and plant gently on this land, to work in solidarity with Indigenous people and support Indigenous sovereignty, resurgence and Land Back.

Ravyn Ariah Wngz is a Tanzanian, Bermudian, Mohawk, 2Spirit, empowerment movement storyteller of Trans experience, whose work is rooted in Black liberation and Indigenous Resurgence. She is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada.

@nowtoronto

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