About the Symposium
Architectural creation, its representation, interpretation, and associated activities more often than not are seen as processes of revelation. However, one can argue that architecture hides as much as it reveals. The Purloined Letter, a detective story written by Edgar Allen Poe, describes the chase to look for a stolen letter with confidential information. The story revolves around the search for a letter hidden by being left out in the open. Allen Poe highlights a complicated relationship between visibility, revelation, clarity and its complementary hiding, concealing, camouflaging.
In the realm of architecture, are there examples of ‘hiding’ in teaching, representing, knowing, writing and building architecture? If so, how do those manifest themselves? How is hiding practiced under other terms that obscure the practice of concealment? What does it result in? What sources does it emerge from and who operates behind it?
This symposium aims to explore processes of hiding that can take representational, material and theoretical forms.
Architectures of Hiding is the inaugural event in the series of biennial symposia called Agora, organized by Carleton Research | Practice of Teaching | Collaborative (CR|PT|C).
CR|PT|C is formed by PhD candidates and students, Post-Professional Master students, and faculty members from the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
Held on September 24–26, 2021, the symposium is organized and coordinated by Rana Abughannam, Émélie Desrochers Turgeon and Pallavi Swaranjali with the supervision of Federica Goffi and with the advisorship of Monica Eileen Patterson.
Under the theme of Architectures of Hiding, Avert is a work situated within the public sites in which gender-based violence operates, subtly existing alongside the day-to-day ebb and f|ow of pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Through this positioning, the work critiques these spaces which can be designed unsafely, and which are undoubtedly socially regulated by settler-colonial heteropatriarchal systems of oppression. The podcast features Heather Leier in conversation with Ryan Stec, Artistic Director at Artengine, and Pallavi Swaranjali, co-convenor, Architectures of Hiding and co-coordinator of C R | P T | C.
The creative piece by Heather Leier can be found at www.architecturesofhiding.com/exhibition
Heather Leier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Calgary in Treaty 7 region in southern Alberta, Canada. Through her art practice, she employs research-creation approaches to examine embodied trauma and problematize shared assumptions of socially constructed life-phases and identities. This work ranges from the production of printed ephemera to life-size site-specific print installations all of which draw attention to negotiations of space and endurance with violence. Leier has exhibited her work widely both nationally and internationally including exhibitions in Spain, China, USA, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Russia, Japan, Poland, Egypt, Mexico, and Taiwan. Leier has curated a number of contemporary art projects and was the 2020 recipient of the University of Calgary Sustainability Teaching Award. When she isn’t teaching or working on various print projects, she is likely tending to her growing plant collection or helping to facilitate gallery programming at Alberta Printmakers Society. Leier is a white settler and her pronouns are she/her.
Cheryl L’Hirondelle presents the process and ideas behind her new work Nipawiwin Akikodjiwan: Pimizi ohci, shown for the first time as part of our Entanglements exhibition. The work is a immersive AV installation about (and with) the eels and their challenges in the context of our local hydroelectric dam on the Ottawa River. L’Hirondelle discusses how her relationship with the falls evolved as she discovered the existence of eel ladders designed to help the endangered animals on their journey through the river.
What does it mean to speak of “aural culture?” What does listening offer, as a tool or technique for understanding our world, that visual perception cannot? The sounds that fill our lives are dense with information about the interwoven cultures to which we belong, and approaches to their investigation can take similarly varied routes. For Linda-Ruth Salter, language is a primary element of culture. Expressed aloud it is a richly coded meaning system, but it can also speak volumes when forced into silence.