Belle Park Pluriverses

Belle Park was established in 1973 in Kingston, Ontario, on a former landfill built on a wetland. Over the past three years, the SSHRC-funded Belle Park Project has been employing Research-Creation and community and interdisciplinary collaboration to engage with this small but highly complex space, whose most prominent feature is a totem pole carved by incarcerated Indigenous men in a local prison. The land is contaminated, but despite this the park is a rich natural habitat, and it is also the location of an encampment of unhoused people. Many existing models of harm and resistance do not capture the frictions and possibilities we experience in this site. “Belle Park Pluriverses” offers poetry and found poetry, along with photographs, to reveal and trouble binaries such as wild v. domestic, dry v. wet, beautiful v. ugly, care v. neglect, garbage v. means of life.

Photos by Dorit Naaman and Laura J. Murray.