A home doubles as a passport office. A restaurant doubles as a nightclub. A hair salon doubles as a child daycare centre.

This doubling of space and purpose is itself a kind of infrastructure; the kind we build between ourselves, as opposed to the kind of infrastructure the state builds for us. The necessity of these alternative spaces is born from the reality that very often the state’s infrastructure was not built to hold us or serve us. Not wholly. Architect and theorist Dele Adeyemo describes infrastructure not only as the buildings, roads, systems, and institutions that organize public life, but also the networks of people, practices, knowledge, and care through which we make life possible.

Featuring the work of exhibiting artists Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba and Fegor Obuwoma, Reroute, Reroute! considers the spaces Black, queer and diasporic communities inhabit, and the ways we continuously contour those spaces, visibly or invisibly, to meet the evolving needs, desires and dreams of those communities.

Black diasporic and queer life have always involved forms of movement, translation, and adaptation: movement across the Atlantic and across borders; movement between languages and cultural systems; movement between the gender and desire we were assigned and those we have claimed for ourselves. But movement is not only displacement. It is also a means of carrying knowledge, relationships, and ways of being into new contexts, and of making new forms from what is already at hand. The spaces we create in this way reroute restrictive infrastructure, taking the shape our lives take rather than requiring us to take the shape it prescribes.

The work of Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba and Fegor Obuwoma moves within this tension, between visibility and opacity, between the infrastructures that organize our lives and the infrastructures we create for ourselves. Their practices ask what becomes possible when space is not treated as fixed, when maps are understood as partial, and when the things that sustain us are allowed.