Dear Reader,
 
These days, we are thinking about belonging—specifically, about where architecture belongs and to whom it belongs, about what belongs to the field of architecture and what gets left out of the disciplinary conversation. Through our more-than-forty-year record of activity as a centre for architectural thought, we have often played a part in answering these questions, acting as both critic of and participant in the shaping of the built environment. In the process, we have had a hand in deciding how “architecture” is defined, helping frame the discipline around what we see as its deeply public concerns. But as an institution, the CCA is—like the definition of architecture itself—necessarily embedded and entangled in the very same social and historical processes we so often explore in our exhibitions, research programs, publications, and public events. We cannot, we have long known, untangle or enrich our perspectives on the built environment without inviting other voices into the discussion. 

With that in mind, we have been wondering: looking forward, what partnerships can we establish to expand our dialogues about the relationships between architecture and society, architecture and climate change, architecture and land dispossession, and architecture and sited forms of historiography, and to reflect on how the way we work as an institution keys into these questions? How can we meaningfully open our doors and, in understanding the forces that have long shaped what we call architecture, share resources with and learn from those left out of its written histories? Where do we go from here?

Beginning in April 2021, we began to address these questions head on, collaborating with members of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation to develop a living land acknowledgment that has since become a significant part of our institutional mandate. We also, last year, published the first installment of a project with Tsi Tkarón:to/Toronto-based multidisciplinary performance artist Ange Loft, of Kahnawà:ke Kanien'kehá:ka Territory, the inaugural recipient of our biennial fellowship for Indigenous researchers working on land restitution. More recently, we launched the Indigenous-led Design Fellowship program, which offers Indigenous designers support for projects that, in conversation both with Fellows’ home communities and with the CCA, seek to expand the scope and definition of Indigenous design. In each of these initiatives, inviting new voices has been and will be invaluable to reimagining what the future of architectural practice and thought can be—and to reimagining whom that future belongs to.


Now, with our upcoming exhibition and publication project, ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home, which opens this Saturday in our Main galleries, we turn to the home communities of the circumpolar North to further reorient our vantage—to look, that is, at the North, from the North. Informed by the perspectives of a group of Inuit, Sámi, and settler curators—Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, and Rafico Ruiz— ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home explores how communities across the Arctic are creating self-determined spaces, redefining architecture based on Indigenous understandings of home. Oriented towards the Indigenous communities of the circumpolar North—that is, towards home—the project examines and celebrates practices of designing and building on the land through installations by artists asinnajaq, Carola Grahn, Geronimo Inutiq, Ingemar Israelsson, Nango, Partridge, and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory. It also features material from the Futurecasting: Indigenous-led Design in the Arctic workshop, an endeavour parallel to the project that invited nine participants to explore the future of Indigenous-led design in the circumpolar North. The exhibition launches this Saturday, 11 June, with a daylong event featuring a series of conversations with the curators, artists, and workshop participants, as well as an evening DJ set by Geronimo Inutiq. 

To further celebrate the ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home opening, this week we also publish a conversation between Ella den Elzen, Taqralik Partridge, and Rafico Ruiz about the importance of Inuit homelands and about the exhibition’s conception. Conversations with co-curators Joar Nango and Jocelyn Piirainen will follow in the coming weeks. For now, we leave you with Partridge’s invitation from the article: “I want Inuit or Sámi to recognize themselves in this space, in the things that are here.” She wants others, she says, “to feel welcome” in the Indigenous curators’ worlds, “to feel like they're entering a space different from what they would expect.” Whoever you are, we hope you will find you belong here too.


Yours,
the CCA

P.S.  Check the opportunities currently open at the CCA.