Understanding Cultural Belonging The project began as a personal exploration, rooted in questions of identity, inheritance, and cultural loss. In the Grey, named after my experience of having a Black father and a White mother, symbolizes more than my own identity. Its a metaphor for the in-between–a space where life is not clearly defined as one thing or another. As a second-generation Canadian of Polish, Trinidadian, and Venezuelan descent, I often felt caught between cultures, unsure of what truly belonged to me and never feeling fully accepted within any one community.
But I knew I couldn’t be alone in this. I wanted to understand if others felt similar tensions of disconnection, duality, or uncertainty, and how these cultural relationships shaped their sense of self. To explore this, I designed a survey-questionnaire inviting participants across Toronto to reflect on how their cultural identities have been shaped and transmitted across generations.