Portraits of Queer Living: material narratives and co-producing the queer home

The home is often understood as the physical manifestation of identity, yet remains defined by heteronormative models that restrict non-normative domesticity. This article reflects on TO·BE·LONGING: Portraits of Queer Living, a community-engaged inquiry into the one-bedroom condominium and its potential to facilitate queer self-determination. Grounded in two spatial interventions and 40 community-contributed artifacts, the project explores how queer domesticity, belonging, and resilience are articulated through lived experience and material narratives rather than solely spatial physicality. Central to this inquiry, the co-production of a new domestic imaginary emerges through an imminent queering of space mediated through encounters between the Inhabitant (the active knower) and the Guest (the learner). This exploration examines symbiotic encounters between the public and private realms across two exhibitions: staging a home at the Design at Riverside Gallery (2025) and a tactical occupation of a suite at the Ace Hotel Toronto (2026). This mechanism of co-production is mediated through material narratives identifying varying modalities between the Active Queer Object—possessing an inherent queer logic—and the Latent Queer Object—holding dormant potential to be “queered” through an imparted social biography. This exchange situates the artifact as the primary agent of change, transforming the domestic interior from a static container into a catalyst that fosters emergent queer domiciles for Inhabitant, Guest, and Artifact. By prioritizing subjective experience and material agency, this work advances a critical path toward a pluralistic mode of living that responds to the fluid embodiment of lived identities.