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.
Join us as Macy Siu gives us the lowdown on another development from the Digital Economies Lab – the Offer/Need Machine. In an era where the gig economy has monetized every informal network from ride sharing to pet sitting, the Offer/Need Machine proposes a network of decentralized reciprocity. Pay close attention to when Siu explains the need for an anti-capitalist model and more-than-human design.