16/09/2026
Over the past year, much of my creative energy has gone into building The Leeça Space. I’ve been writing essays and field notes, gathering ideas, making photographs, and slowly creating a home for the different strands of my work.
Now that I’ve returned to school on a genuinely part-time schedule, I’m beginning to have room for some of the other seeds I’ve been planting.
Today, for example, I’ll spend the day with board members discussing the new school that will eventually bring our three high schools together. Tonight, Jasmine and I are going to the media opening night at Théâtre de la Bordée. These are very different parts of my life, but lately they feel as though they are beginning to speak to one another.
And I think I’m almost ready to begin Land and Lives.
For the past two years, I’ve been quietly keeping a list of people whose lives and stories have stayed with me. Some are people I’ve met recently. Others I’ve known for many years. They come from different places and have followed very different paths, but each carries something about this country that I would like to understand and preserve.
Land and Lives is a long-term vision, perhaps a ten-year project. I want to create a human map of Canada, one person and one story at a time, through portraits, recorded conversations, written stories, and the sounds of the places people call home.
Canada is not one story. It is carried by Indigenous peoples whose histories long precede the country, by families rooted here for generations, and by people who have arrived more recently from every part of the world. It is rural and urban, French and English and hundreds of other languages. We do not always agree, and we have not always lived up to the country we imagine ourselves to be.
But at this particular moment, I feel that we are defining ourselves more consciously. I see people standing up for one another. I see us recognizing that what holds us together is worth cherishing and, when necessary, defending.
A democracy is never simply finished and handed to us. It is something we create through the ways we live together. Land and Lives will be my way of paying attention to the human beings who make that possible.
The page I’m sharing today holds the beginnings of the map. Its doorways lead to different regions of the country, but the stories are still to come. I don’t know exactly where the project will take me or whose lives I will encounter along the way. That is part of its purpose.
Not all the seeds are blossoming yet. But some of them are. And this feels like the right time to open the door to this one.
Land & Lives is a long-term documentary project by Leeca St. Aubin exploring the relationship between people and place across Canada through portraiture, photography, and conversation.
