-POST-
Our project, -POST-, was shortlisted for the 2023 Venice Biennale. The core team comprised YAO+ at Carleton University (Ozayr Saloojee, Piper Bernbaum, and Suzy Harris-Brandt) and HiLo at UBC (Thena Tak and Blair), with essential contributions from HiLo Lab member Jon Ackerley. We extend our gratitude to the many collaborators whose insight and talent made this project possible. A full list of contributors is available on the -POST- project website. Please visit the site and scroll down to see all who were involved.
Venice Biennale 2023
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campuses are situated the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the ancestral and traditional territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səlí̓ lwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. We are committed not to simply acknowledge Musqueam territory, but to realize that acknowledgement in an active dedication to more just, more accountable relations.
We acknowledge Carleton University’s location on the traditional, unceded territories of the Algonquin nation, including our responsibility to the Algonquin people, and a responsibility to adhere to Algonquin cultural protocols. We commit to respect Ojigkwanong principles and the Kinàmàgawin ‘Calls to Action’ seeking to revitalize Carleton’s Indigenous strategy and re-energize our relationships with Indigenous communities—in Algonquin territory and across the country.
Posts
1. Posts are everyday, fundamental components of architecture.
2. They are vertical elements - a combination of commissioned + core-team designed work
3. Materially, formally and experientially layered models that engage with critical ideas of the Post-Nation.
4. Physical objects that speak to new centers of architectural authorship, knowledge, forms, space and tools.
WHO HAS PERMISSION TO NARRATE?
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, pedago-gies 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-, our shortlisted - and now rejected - proposal for Canada’s contribution to the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. We ask 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? In asking these questions -POST- looks to platform other stories in order to explore other centers of architecture, form, space, and authority. Architecture 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. 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. What does it mean to be Post Carbon, Post National, Post Colonial, Post Racial, Post Human, Post-?
-POST- is a project about decolonization and decarbonization, and is organized by two essential elements: the nurse-log and commissioned posts.
These elements sit in dialogue with each other, with the nurse-log as an architectural seedbed from which other stories take root, disrupt, emerge. 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 stories, other pedagogies and other centers of knowledge - all of which look to refuse the artifice of so-called Canada.
-POST- was envisioned as a tender, discursive space - and a discursive process. As such, the project was fundamentally about learning through making, through collaboration, and through the ceding of authorities of ownership, expression, and singular, valorizing narratives.
Indigenous worldviews are crucial to the construction of Canada as a Post-Nation and Indigenous framing and direction is a fundamental part of our project.
- POST - is a project that continues relationships with Indigenous scholars, designers and artists, rather than one that starts from scratch.
HiLo/YOW+ is a design/research collaborative with the @hilolab.sala at @ubcsala and the YOW+ collective at @carleton_architecture
-POST- Website: https://www.postexhibition.ca/
