CURRENT/RECENT →
In Which We Draw A People’s Map of the Don River… (2020-23), was a series of aesthetic provocations, engagements, gatherings, and public actions along the site of Toronto’s Wonscotonach (a.k.a. Don River) that assembled local activists and artists, urban planners, policymakers, and diverse community members to participate in a collective dream on the future of this urban water-site.
Hosted by Waterfront Toronto and Evergreen, as part of ArtworxTO, Toronto’s Year of Public Art in 2021, the project aimed to “recommon” a neglected river, and reconnect pathways that unite interdependent places, histories, practices, and peoples in a time of change.
Read More →“I kept wondering what can I do to make these places real to the public? I had a stack of reports six inches high, and I feared they were going to sit on a shelf and only be looked at by consultants working for developers...I knew that artists and writers saw these places as sources of inspiration and I wanted people to know why they were important to the future of our city.” ~ Jane Weninger, project participant, Senior Planner.
“You can't really discuss equity in one hour for 150 bucks you know, like, equity is the long game. Social change is so, so slow... it's not a very fast process… it’s an incredibly slow and arduous process.” ~ Pamila Matharu, project participant, artist & educator.
“Is it possible for artists to really make real change when working with the government, or with powerful corporations? How close can art get to power, while still being able to critique that power?” ~ Diya Vij, project participant, independent curator.
Watch: “The Artist As Policy Shaper: A Conversation”
Read the “Artist As Policy Shaper Grey Paper“ ->
ML’s work bridges dialogues in art, activism, and science, by remapping landscapes, reclaiming local ecologies, and observing and recording the overlaps of nature, industry, and the polis. The collective’s projects connect divergent constituencies with shared environmental concerns, create waterfront narratives ranging from the industrial to the personal, and catalyze the creation of engaged publics. Employing the methodologies of civic hacking, participation, open source, social sculpture, and temporary occupations, the collective extrapolates on Henri Lefebvre’s or David Harvey's “right to the city” to include its neglected waterways.
ML has presented work at the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris, Waterfront Toronto/Evergreen Brickworks, (Toronto), the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge (US), the Parrish Art Museum, Parsons/The New School, Boston Center for the Arts, EFA Project Space, Smack Mellon, MASS MoCA, The Neuberger Museum, Works on Water Triennial at 3LD, Maker Faire, the PsyGeoConflux Festival (NYC), Alexandraplatz (Montreal), and the Antique Boat Museum (NY), and our projects have been written about in Hyperallergic, Make Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Bad at Sports, The Village Voice, Hakai, Vice, NBC, NPR, GOOD, Orion, Hakai, The Wall Street Journal, and others.
On this website, you can read about our past and current projects below, and download broadsheet-sized pdf files to build liberum dories, punts, kayaks, and paper canoes.
166 7th Street // Gowanus Studio Space
Brooklyn, New York 11215