The making of space

For many Black, Indigenous and/or people of colour (BIPOC), western Universities are not sites of emancipation or validation, but hostile institutions where social hierarchies are reproduced and specific knowledges are privileged at the expense of others. This essay unpacks the politics of space through an examination of discursive art projects that take ‘the colour-line’ as a starting point to complicate and resist binaries of centre/periphery, insider/outsider, knowledge consumer/knowledge producer and individual/collective — to interrogate the dialectics of race, space and pedagogy. The projects discussed herein are public expressions of self-determined autonomous Black spaces explored by individuals and collectives within a critical art context.