Angirramut / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home

Home is one of those slippery words, conjured often but seldom in all its suggestive complexities or in a way that encapsulates its tangled material and emotive qualities. So, when home is given opportunity to be expressed simultaneously as verb, noun, and adjective, it is not without significance. Angirramut / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) offers a rare glimpse into the world-making possibilities of home upended from flattened representations readily available elsewhere. Co-curated by Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, and Rafico Ruiz, this in-depth, multi-vocal project centres around self-determined, Indigenous space and place-making informed by understandings of the land as home. At the entrance to the exhibition, an installation by Tiffany Shaw functions as a threshold through which to contemplate a constellation of shelters. The unassuming snaking form constructed from plywood and lumber, accommodating jackets, boots, snowshoes, a small freezer, braided grass, and numerous other provisions, recalls a communal hunting, fishing, or domestic space. The surrounding orange, pink, and purple ombré walls envelop the assemblage in a sunrise. In one of the extensive online articles related to the exhibition, Shaw describes the installation as a porch: “For me, the porch is about having people enter our worlds — the Indigenous co-curators’ worlds — to feel welcome, to feel like they’re entering a space different from what they would expect of a building that looks like the CCA.” Taqralik Partridge & Tiffany ShawVestibule, installation view, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2022.Photo: Mathieu Gagnon © CCA Joar Nango’s Sámi Architectural Library (2019, 2022) acts as one of the exhibition’s conceptual anchors. The sprawling installation of books, domestic and other objects, textiles, images, sculptures, and video supported on wooden structures suggests an improvisational bent and a material rebellion aimed at architecture’s colonial binds. Although there are somewhat conventional library components on view — including a low wooden crate functioning as a table, draped with fabric and fur, on which various books are arranged, with a hand-written sign reading “Architectural Theory” — the Sámi Architectural Library’s multiplicity of materialities constructs alternate legibilities and establishes architectural vocabularies outside of dominant architectural modes, recasting how space might be authored, physically and otherwise. Nango’s alluringly detailed installation speaks to his ongoing interest in autonomous Sámispaces and possibilities for Indigenous communities to define and manage for themselves built forms that serve needs and livelihoods established within rather than those imposed by colonial forces from without. Joar NangoSámi Architectural Library, 2019, installation view, 2022.Photo: Mathieu Gagnon © CCA Of the many compelling through-lines offered in Towards Home, the attention given to liminal and interstitial spaces reads as essential. Whether asinnajaq’s (with Tiffany Shaw) Nuna (2022) referencing an igloo covered in fabric printed with images of moss and lichens to convey home as a provisional, shifting retreat for different seasons or Taqralik Partridge’s lightbox images of often unheeded spaces where Inuit live, travel, and form community in Iqaluit, Nunavut, and Dorval, the exhibition trains our attention toward interspatial, in-between, and humble yet empowered spaces where home is made and deeply felt. asinnajaq & Tiffany ShawNuna, installation view, Canadian centre for Architecture, 2022.Photo: Mathieu Gagnon © CCA Joar Nango, Noa Bronstein, Taqralik Partridge, Tiffany Shaw

Angirramut / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home

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Angirramut / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home

Michelle Furlong

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Peter Fischli and David WeissHow to Work Better

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