The Canadian Centre for Architecture has released its 2023 program. This year’s initiative will continue to build on the organization’s commitment to represent the complex and multifaceted reality of the architectural field and its discourses.
The notion of land-based knowledges developed in dialogue with Indigenous communities has been fundamental in 2022 to opening a new perspective on the CCA’s ongoing work on environmental discourses, as demonstrated by the 2 exhibition ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home, on view through 26 March at the CCA, and opening in September 2023 at the Architecture and Design Gallery of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
“In 2023 the CCA builds on commitments and projects that provide support and resources to Indigenous communities and researchers to interrogate the built environment and reshape the CCA’s institutional understanding as a settler institution intent on pushing architectural thinking forward,” says the organization.
The CCA 2023 program will also highlight the collaboration with Tsi Tkarón:to- (Toronto)-based multidisciplinary performance artist Ange Loft, of Kahnawà:ke Kanien’kehá:ka Territory, through a three-site installation inaugurated in February 2023 that reflects on Mohawk place-naming, the role of archaeology in urbanism and settler colonialism, and other ways in which the land on which the CCA is situated was once a part of Kanien’kehá:ka Territory.
The organization’s interest in decolonization is also materialized in the upcoming publication, Centring Africa: A Sourcebook for Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture, a series of conversations between researchers that frame the “how” of centring Africa through ways of finding, seeing, and listening to archival sources across the continent.
The program will also offer the first episode of The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project, co-curated by Bas Princen and Stefano Graziani; the next iteration of the three-part Out of the Box exhibition series, provide new and expanded readings of the work of Argentinian architect Amancio Williams, one of the key figures of modern architecture in Latin America, which will launch in June and is curated by Studio Muoto, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, and Claudia Shmidt.
The CCA will premiere two new documentary films, Once We Are Old, the final installment in a three-part documentary film series launched in 2019, conceived by Giovanna Borasi and directed by Daniel Schwartz, that examines the ways in which changing societies, new economic pressures, and increasing population density are affecting the homes of various communities.
This third film will focus on how the growing aging population is reforming architectural and social constructs. The documentary film كیف لا نغرق في السراب / To Remain in the No Longer by Joyce Joumaa, 2021–2022 CCA Emerging Curator, shot at the unfinished international fairground site designed by Oscar Niemeyer in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, looks at how architecture operates in this failed state.
By examining the precarity of the project site that remains to this day, the documentary reflects on the country’s current socio-economic crisis. The film will premiere on 9 February and be accompanied by an exhibition under the same title in the form of research notes in the CCA Octagonal Gallery.
The CCA’s research fellowship programs are open to researchers, architects, and curators who intend to pursue interdisciplinary research on architecture, urbanism, landscape, and/or design at the CCA.
“We have selected the ten fellows who join us in 2023 within the framework of three of our research fellowship programs: the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship, the CCA Virtual Fellowship, and the CCA Research Fellowship,” says the organization.
For more information, visit: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/