Together with Toronto-based collaborators, New York-based art collective Mare Liberum is engaging with the Don/Wonscotonach – its environmental, artistic, and social history/ies – and the Don Mouth Renaturalization project through a series of programs envisioning speculative maps for the future of the watershed.

As the Don River is changing, its boundaries are being redrawn before our eyes, the project asks us to consider “What do we want to remember of this time? What will the River remember of us?” For and by whom does the current Don River exist? And the future Don? Who owns land that is created through a process of landfill and “reclamation” of Lake Ontario? Who is consulted in its construction and future use? How might histories of extraction, colonialist exploitation of the land, and the toxic legacies of industry invite a future which is more just, oriented around care and collaboration, and in balance?

Mare Liberum’s In Which We Draw A People’s Map of the Don River… (2021-22), is an artistic research project and series of provocations, engagements, gatherings, and public actions along the site of Toronto’s Don River that bring in local stakeholders, policymakers, and community members to collaborate on the future of the site.

The project is oriented in relation to the ongoing Don Mouth Naturalization and Port Lands Flood Protection Project (DMNP) which will reconnect the Don River and Lake Ontario, breaking down environmental, social, and institutional barriers that have artificially divided that which is indivisible: the river, the city, its inhabitants.

Hosted by Waterfront Toronto and Evergreen, as part of ArtworxTO, Toronto’s Year of Public Art in 2021, the project aims to reestablish the pathways that unite interdependent sites and people along urban watercourses.