Self-initiated project, 2015 - Present
Location: Toronto, Canada
The Portlands is a post-industrial neighbourhood of downtown Toronto. Its vast spaces and central location have long tempted developers, who have been continually dissuaded by the costs of cleanup, demolition, and new transit. Envisioning continued indifference towards the area could yield something new: abandonment as a peaceful and passive way of making private property communal. The project depicts a future Portlands where squatters have settled and turned the region into a self-sufficient community. Homesteads flourish, and farmers till the soil with skyscrapers looming nearby. The roots of plants slowly crack and fragment the old asphalt roads. Trees grow from the foundations of demolished oil tanks. Eventually the whole territory will be subsumed in forest. The former factories become an archipelago of monuments within an inhabited park.
