Bio
Victoria McKenzie is a Jamaican-Trinidadian academic-activist, research architect and movement artist. Her work focuses on the interconnections and tensions between the built environment; socio-politics and climate change through a decolonial lens. She is the founder and director of an architectural research agency ‘RRA’ Radical Research & Re-storying Agency (2022) which asks the question: “how can the pre-colonial past inform a decolonial future?” and has worked on a variety of architectural projects in the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America and Europe. Alongside RRA, Victoria is a proponent of radical pedagogy and has taught at various institutions in the Netherlands including the Sandberg Institute, Rietveld Academie; St. Joost School of Art & Design and currently at the Royal Academy of Art, KABK’s MA Non-Linear Narratives where she designed and teaches the course ‘Restorying Climate’.
As a radical dreamer and believer that a new and just future can exist, Victoria has worked with a variety of architectural practices and arts institutions such as ICE Institute for Creative Exchange, Cittadellarte, Triennale di Milano, SOCA - Studio of Contemporary Architecture, Amisacho Restoracíon, Somerset House, Forensic Architecture, Adjaye Associates and Het Nieuwe Instituut—to connect art, design, politics and ecology. She sits on the board of directors for ‘African Design Matters’ and her most recent joy has been hosting the podcast ‘Kitchen Flex’ which opens the space for a dialogue on decolonizing spaces, places and life on Earth.
Early Life + Journey
Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Victoria spent the first sixteen years of her life steeped in the ecology and socio-political context of her Island Nation. With a Jamaican mother and Trinidadian father, the Caribbean will forever be her home in a way that home is the diasporic body embedding within her a language of revolution and spirit. Growing up in “post-colonial” Jamaica and witnessing not only the beauty of the landscape but the oppression that people still lived under allowed her to question why it is that the post-colonial, never became the de-colonial. Why did the categories of race, class and gender still exist on the island today and what does it truly mean, in the words of Bob Marley—“to emancipate [ourselves] from mental slavery”? These questions, as well as the oceanic reverberations of the Caribbean are something born and alive in Victoria’s being and practice today.
At the age of sixteen, she migrated to Toronto, Canada where she completed her high school education as well as her trainings with the Royal Academy of Dance in Ballet, before exploring other forms of embodied somatic movement that felt more aligned with the body’s relationship to space. Victoria pursued and completed her Bachelor’s of Arts and Sciences at the University of Toronto with a Specialist in Literature and Critical Theory and a double minor in Urban Studies and Human Geography. After her BA, she moved to London, England where she achieved her MA at Goldsmiths’ University of London with the Forensic Architecture’s ‘Centre for Research Architecture’. She was awarded a high distinction for her work on the myco-remediation of toxic oil spills in the Ecuadorian Amazon where she was invited to live and engage in the activism of tyco-remediation. From this work, Victoria was accepted as a Phd candidate at UCL, University of London’s department of the History of Art and Ecology where she worked at the intersections of soil ecologies, colonialism, and philosophies of being against climate change.
Alongside her Phd, Victoria worked in the architectural industry living between London, New York and Ghana, where she was able to understand theory as it met practice before making the move in 2021 to live in Accra, Ghana full time to pursue an architectural research project on pre-colonial indigenous design. This particular project was seminal for Victoria in the way that it opened her eyes to a different way of being and designing outside of Western Modernism. This pre-colonial and African/Indigenous way of designing wasn’t just about creating a structure, but creating systems that allowed for embodiment, community and the thriving of the ecological context beyond neoliberal notions of ‘sustainability’.
After the completion of this project, Victoria activated her research on decolonial theory, design and climate justice in a myriad of ways. Through her architectural research agency RRA; designing and teaching decolonial courses at various institutions within the Netherlands; an embodiment practice that brings together the relationship between choreography and geography; as well as her activism and dedication to seeing justice against extractive economies and corporations in this lifetime.
Teachings + Current Endeavours
Victoria designed and taught a two year Masters course at the Sandberg Instituut, Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands entitled ‘The Ecological Self’ as part of the 'Ecologies of Transformation’ MA degree. This work was largely inspired by her time living and working in the Southern Region of the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2019 where she acted as Project Lead and Consultant for ongoing fungal mycoremedial projects of remediating toxic oil spills within surrounding indigenous lands and communities.
She sits on the board of directors for ‘African Design Matters’, a project based in Accra, Ghana which works to elevate indigenous African design systems and symbologies as forms of knowledge and expression embedded within pre-colonial landscapes. She was the MA theory tutor in ‘Ecology Futures’ and Head of Theory (2023-2025) at St. Joost School of Art & Design—an art and design masters program dedicated to analysing environmental degradation as well as the possibilities of designing our way out of ‘crisis’. Currently, she lectures at the Royal Academy of Arts, KABK in The Hague, MA for Non-Linear Narrative on forensics, investigation and non-linear story-telling as it pertains to the mitigation of climate through a decolonial lens.
Victoria was one of the 2023-2024 artist-in-residence at Het Niuewe Instituut’s ‘-1’ program where she has launched the podcast ‘Kitchen Flex’—a dialogue on how communities, storytelling and the Earth come together to turn ‘space’ into ‘place’.
Currently, Victoria is a part of the artist research team for ‘Travelling Dream School’ in Mexico City which weaves art, philosophy, anthropology and situated healing practices to continue the reparative work of reclaiming rejected knowledges of pre-Hispanic dream lineages.