Canada Council for the Arts announces 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture shortlist

The Canada Council for the Arts has announced its shortlist for Canada’s official representation at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2023. The team and proposal that will represent Canada will be announced in March 2022, with the exhibition taking place at the Canada Pavilion in the Giardini from May to November 2023.

The shortlist includes:

Architects Against Housing Alienation 

“Not for Sale!: Housing Beyond Capitalism”

Canada is suffering from a deep and protracted housing crisis—ranging from a widespread lack of affordability to under-housing, precarious housing, and homelessness. This contemporary reality formed through the extractive logic of speculative real estate, is built on the simultaneous colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands and the modern invention of fee-simple property. In order to advocate for an urgent response to this urban and Indigenous emergency, the Architects Against Housing Alienation (A.A.H.A.) propose that the Canada Pavilion present a genealogy of the crisis alongside a mass of activist demonstrations, conversations, and architectural visions for housing beyond capitalism.

Chevalier Morales Collaborative

“Pre-Occupied Architectures / Prerequisites”

Pre-Occupied Architectures / Prerequisites looks at how buildings meet their ground as a shared space with a deep history—one that is collective, social, economic and geopolitical. How can we reformulate the spatial and cultural conditions of listening? Such questions are pressing in architecture schools and are addressed—albeit partially—in exemplary architecture projects throughout Canada.

Chevalier Morales Collaborative is a research unit in search of new operating models, collaborative strategies and listening tools in the field of architecture. For the Biennale, the unit would integrate four academics from four different universities in three different provinces, who are specialized in the fields of Indigenous studies, architecture, sustainable design, critical practices and architectural mediations.

HiLo/YOW +

“-Post-”

-Post- speculates on a series of narratives in Canadian architecture, reflecting on past and future relationships, and the material stories that underpin them. The Canadian Pavilion will be transformed through a set of installations into an experiential, global event space where guests will be invited to consider: “how can we ask better questions through the stories we tell?”

-Post- measures, positions, supports and takes stock, by placing visitors in relation to space, history, time and identity. The pavilion, itself a communication post, becomes an architectural prompt and provocation to investigate the multiplicity of Canada’s past, present and future stories.

HiLo/YOW+  is a diverse multidisciplinary design collaborative that spans Turtle Island and beyond, with team members from Africa, the Netherlands, the United States and Canada. Linking two schools of architecture, HiLo is based in Vancouver (at UBC’s School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture) and YOW+ in Ottawa (at Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture + Urbanism).

marc boutin architectural collaborative

“Towards a Vernacular of Resilience”

The scale and interconnectedness of our global economy and its profit driven nature has fundamentally altered the world. In the Canadian context, this is manifest in sites of resource exploitation where the demand for a maximized return on investment supersedes all other dimensions of community building.   

Working at the scale of ‘single resource communities’, Towards a Vernacular of Resilience focuses on decoupling economic practices from global dependencies while recuperating silenced voices to forge authentic and resilient relations between economic processes and local social, cultural, and ecological practices.

The project conceptually reinvests in material, spatial and tectonic practices towards realizing a more socially-resilient, culturally-relevant, and ecologically-contributive future.

marc boutin architectural collaborative (MBAC) is an interdisciplinary design studio that explores interventions in contexts that are multi-scalar in nature with a process that is collaborative in practice. The work of the firm is characterized by the synergies that emerge in the co-consideration of architecture, urban design, industrial design and art-making.