Montreal and Toronto, Canada
Quentin VerCetty Lindsay

Quentin VerCetty Lindsay is an award-winning, multidisciplinary visual griot (storyteller), artpreneur, art educator, activist, and an ever-growing interstellar tree based in Montreal, Canada. He is also co-founder and director of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, whose foundational work with second-wave Afrofuturism provides new, inclusive, and intersectional perspectives to reimagine public spaces.

His project, Missing Black Technofossil Here, uses augmented reality, digital 3D art, and printing to address the absence of monuments to Black bodies in Toronto and across the Canadian landscape. The project will exhibit works of digital, imaginary monuments to local Black Canadian leaders, past and present, in futuristic community spaces. The project will facilitate workshops that engage community members to create awareness around erasure.
 
VerCetty Lindsay has numerous publications, art, and essays on Afrofuturism, art, feminism, gang and drug intervention, and social reforms in numerous publications. He also has his own book in the works about his life journey lessons from being a street hustler to where he is now, entitled Exported Pollen from Mercury: Tales and Parables from a Life Growth along with several artistic projects like creating a series of bronze cast rapid-prototype larger than life-scaled bust monument commissions.

Featured Work

Missing Black Technofossil Here uses augmented reality, digital 3D art and printing, to address Tania Inniss’ notion that “the absence of Black representation in art” is erasure, which is related to the Canadian landscape – Toronto is one of the only major cities in the world without any monuments of Black people. The discourse is that monuments are Afrofuturistic technofossils and are an example of sankofanology, meaning it connects the past, present and future through its existence. Without representation, there is often a lack of validation, valuing and connection for Black people with themselves and other people with them in the present.
 
The current project consists of exhibiting works of digital imaginary statue monuments of local Black Canadian leaders in futuristic community spaces and using them as interventions. Conducting workshops in schools and community centres discussing the importance of Black technofossil and create awareness of the erasure and way artists can take up space. The next phase in the project is the 3D printing of pilot monuments made from digital scans of three Black Toronto community leaders and photographing them next to colonial sculptural monuments with a sign that says, “A Black Technofossil Is Missing Here.”
 
The final objective is to create a permanent statue that pays homage to the first African documented in North America, the multilingual translator and explorer Mathieu Da Costa who was a liaison for the European explorers and different First Nations in Canada. Da Costa’s story challenges the idea of Black history in the Americas only has to do with oppression or popular African-American narratives. Also, it’s a story about self-empowerment, community building and co-existence.