Scarborough is an eastern district of Toronto with a rich, distinct history and culture shaped by its large racialized and immigrant populations. While narratives around queerness in Toronto are often situated within the downtown core, Scarborough has long been a space where queer people – and, particularly, queer people of colour – have existed and resisted. It was, as Richard Fung states in Marvellous Grounds (2018), where some of the first conversations around queerness within a Tamil context were held and it is where the queer narratives of literary works like David Chariandy’s Brother (2017) and Catherine Hernandez’ Scarborough (2017) are set. Despite this recent attention placed on highlighting the unique experiences of queers in Scarborough, there remains a lack of formally documented history of queerness in the east end. Our collective of university researchers, community organizers, lived experience (peer) collaborators, and arts workers, aims to document these missing histories, by exploring how digital spaces and artistic practice can expand notions of community and build new ones.

This digital exhibition aims to both expand upon and subvert the institutional archive where, as Achille Mbembe argues in "The Power of the Archive," archival objects are rendered "dead." When objects enter the space of the archive, they no longer have a life of their own because their purpose within the archive is to help tell the story that the institution is trying to tell. This digital exhibition aims to explore how we can "bring the dead back to life, reintegrate them back in the cycle of time, and allow them to continue to express themselves."

While this digital exhibition aims to breathe life back into the archive, we operate with the understanding that it will always be in a state of perpetual (un)becoming. Rather than claiming to be an impossibly complete documentation of student protest, we hope this archive serves as a model that encourages future scholars to continue interrogating the institutional archive and explore alternative archival engagements in their work.