-POST-

Who has Permission to Narrate?

This paper presentation, for CA²RE Aarhus, explores how architectural design can be a collective ceding (and seeding) of authorities, stories, and power, through a proposal (shortlisted, but runner-up) for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

This project, titled -POST-, was a collaborative initiative between two Canadian schools of architecture and twenty-four curatorial advisors, content advisors and commissioned storytellers, designers and researchers. The team - HiLo/YOW+ is a is a design/research collaborative that spans what is understood as Canada. HiLo/YOW+ are based in Vancouver, British Columbia (at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture - SALA), and in Ottawa Canada (at Carleton University’s School of Architecture and Urbanism - ASAU). “HiLo” represents our approach to research and creative practice. We embrace low-tech tools and low-fidelity methods of making as equally valid counterparts to the high-tech and high-fidelity. In this sense, the “Lo” in HiLo suggests an ethos similar to that of lo-fi music, which accepts rawness as a source of meaning and as the basis for authentic connection between artist and audience. The “Hi” in HiLo reflects our emphasis on elevating voices and materials (waste, the temporary, the excluded) that have been classified as less-than or worse. We work through prototyping, experimenting, observing, collaborating, networking, and drawing. We practice a bottom-up and lateral version of the traditionally top-down disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, art, and design, where low influences high and where thinking is intimately connected with doing. We are invested in materials and their ecologies, and explore the notion of surrogates as both a point of inquiry and a working methodology, with a particular focus on its relationship to the more-than-human world. HiLo Lab is represented on this project by Blair Satterfield, Associate Professor and Chair of Architecture at SALA, and Thena Tak, Lecturer in Architecture at SALA (now faculty at Bard College’s School of Architecture).

Partnered with HiLo is YOW+, a Carleton University-based design collaborative lead by Assistant Professor Piper Bernbaum (Logistics Manager for the Evidence Room project at the 2016 Biennale with Robert Jan van Pelt, Donald McKay and Anne Bordeleau), Assistant Professor Suzy Harris- Brandts (Deputy Curator for Lateral Office’s Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15 project at the 2014 Venice Biennale), and Associate Professor Ozayr Saloojee Organizer, Curator, and Fundraiser for Mobilizing Materialities) . YOW+ is a design collaborative/workshop, whose work exists in the messy overlaps of architecture, law, landscape, representation, and material geographies. The office is interested in the strange and complex relations created at and by these intersections, and what they might mean for contemporary design practice in a fraught, beautiful and fragile world.

The advisory and design/research team comprised established curators, scholars, writers, journalists, sociologists and artists. Commissioned designers stretch across and beyond so-called Canada to Africa (Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, South Africa), the United States, Korea, Spain, the Netherlands and Pakistan. All our commissioned designers are invited to design and contribute “posts” as key elements of the project, and these posts are integrated into the fuller exhibition structure. -POST- is a choreography of collaborative design and knowledge making.

As architectural elements, posts support and measure. They put us in relationship to space and to each other—holding up, pushing down, and anchoring into the ground. They are pilotti, columns, or the tolpi of Venice: the underwater forest that holds a city up from its muddy depths. They are the bricolae of the lagoon that help us navigate the waters of La Serenissima, or perhaps the ports of Vancouver or Port Stanley. Posts hold up cities, buildings, statues, memorials and antennae. Posts march across the landscape holding up wires that carry electricity, communications, cellular signals and Internet memes. Posts hold up the highway barriers on which the kilometer-marker tells us how far we are from home.

Our project embraces, too, the many definitions, possibilities and temporalities of the word post. Posts are simultaneously a physical object (a column, a marker, a vertical condition, an outpost or a trading post), as well as a medium (a news post, Instagram post, twitter post, postscript), as well as an idea (post-human, post-colonial, post-nation). Posts can be suffixes, and prefixes. The can become before, and after. Post, by its own definition, speaks both to past, present and future. Posts are designed, authored, built and assembled. All of these many conditions of the post — as well as their making, their makers, their purposes and functions—are embedded with meaning, whether deliberately or not. As a result, they put us in relationship to the material landscape around us, our architectures, our spaces, ourselves and each other.

A key goal of the project was to challenge the (often) performative nature of design practice by a deliberate relinquishing of power and a ceding of authority to often historically and systemically silenced and excluded voices. This was tied to a material strategy of assembly and disassembly, where waste/cast-off materials were re-purposed as an architectural armature to host and centre these voices. The project was an attempt to enable and enact an ‘otherwise-architecture,’ of design/research that would celebrate Dilip Da Cunha’s assertion that “the purpose of the design is not just to see things differently, but to see different things.” In doing so, this proposal aimed to unsettle the typical spaces, processes, systems, venues, and the typical and expected authors of design-driven research. As a result, we aimed to productively destabilize established practice as a search for reparative protocols through research by design.

Premise

Canada, like Venice, is an artifice that is held up by posts.

These posts take the form and shape of colonial signs, markers, registers, institutions, pedagogies and architectures. These are the lionized and valorized narratives that continue to center a particular vision of Canada as an artifice of repair and reconciliation. These stories claim a heroic, individual universality. Canada, as an artifice, is premised on the erasure of other posts: other worldviews, cosmologies, indigeneities, diasporas, immigrations, struggles, laments, elegies, loves and lives. These are to be found in other centers of architecture, other forms, other tools, other institutions, other authorities, and other pedagogies.

This artifice is the premise of -POST-, a shortlisted - and now rejected - proposal for Canada’s contribution to the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. This project asked (and asks): who (and what) gets to narrate the story of architecture in what we call Canada? Who (and what) has permission to tell those stories? Which stories are edified, raised up, supported? Which ones are not? Which are excluded, hidden, suppressed? How does design enable or disable this? What is the research we do, and do not do, when we think, propose, make and execute architectural visions and worlds?

In asking these questions, -POST- looks to celebrate other stories in order to explore other centers of architecture, form, space, and authority. Architecture, both as discipline and practice, is in search of new, reparative relationships. These relationships - these posts - are stories that can help us reckon with our architectural inheritances, and make possible emancipatory, imaginative futures.

The collaborative and plural vision of this project remakes and re-imagines the architectural post as a pedagogical platform to center effaced and suppressed narratives. Stories can make and unmake universes, can make and unmake maps, and our places within, or outside of them. -POST- looks inward to Canada and past it, to the many Canadas out there, including the image that others have of us, beyond the provincializing borders of disciplines and nations. In doing so, we hope to open up additional discourse about the conventional edges of architectural research, design, and research-by-design.

As a part of our attempt to destabilise normative and typical research by design processes (common, certainly, in North America), the advisory and design team for this project comprises established curators, scholars, writers, journalists, sociologists and artists. One aspect of our research-by-design approach is to challenge, from the outset, the valorised role of the sole designer, the sole author, the sole vision. Indeed, a baseline for the project was to embrace and accept processes and outcomes that would alter initially held ideas or imaginations about the final work. The collaborative team for this project stretched across and beyond Canada to Africa (including contributors from Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, South Africa), the United States, Korea, Spain, the Netherlands and Pakistan. All our commissioned designers are invited to design and contribute “posts” as key elements of the project, and these posts are integrated into the fuller exhibition structure. -POST- is a choreography of collaborative design and knowledge making.

-POST- is a project about decolonization and decarbonisation, and is organized by two essential elements: the nurse-log and commissioned posts.

These two elements sit in relational dialogue with each other, with the nurse-log as an architectural seedbed from which other stories take root, emerge and disrupt. Built with a highly adaptable and re-configurable technique of zippered wood with salvaged materials and skinned in reclaimed, stitched building fabric that celebrates Sashiko mending - the visible art of repair - the nurse-log works as platform for a series of commissioned posts. Leveraging the plural definitions and temporalities of the word post (a vertical element, a column, a prefix: trading post, a suffix: outpost, a media post, a military station…), the exhibition’s posts (as models, media and stories) are built by a group of commissioned designers, artists and scholars from so-called Canada and beyond. Their posts inflect and deflect the nurse-log, altering and transforming it. The nurse-log seeds as it decays, and it becomes a substrate of care for other posts-as-stories, other pedagogies and other centers of knowledge - all of which looks to refuse the artifice of so-called Canada.

-POST- is envisioned as a tender, discursive space - and a discursive process. As such, the project is fundamentally about learning through making, through collaboration, and through the ceding of authorities of ownership, expression, and singular, valorizing narratives.