Rising, vibrant new force in architecture
“It’s about resistance, change, gaining authority back. It’s about self-determination, a living culture.” GERALD MCMASTER CO-CURATOR
It bears Cardinal’s formal signature — curling walls that soften hard right angles of the old military installation, an esthetic counterpoint that makes the division between European and Indigenous cultures clear all on its own — but also his world view. Bear in mind that it was Cardinal, an Order of Canada recipient, who led the campaign to ban the name of the Cleveland baseball team in the Major League playoffs against the Blue Jays in 2016 (he intends to proceed with the discrimination complaint in court).
As Cardinal told Azure magazine this year, “The dominant culture is about dominion over nature and it’s all about power and control; it’s hierarchical,” he said. “The Indigenous world view is entirely different and has been since the dawn of time. Indigenous people come from a perspective of balance and harmony with nature. It is a different way of looking at the world.”
Cardinal, one of the most important architects of his generation, has spent his career campaigning for respect towards Indigenous people, and the entry to the Biennale proposed by his Ottawa-based firm dovetailed with a watershed national moment: During Canada 150 last year, interest in Indigenous culture and history surged, and from opposite directions.
With the full report of the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the horrors of the residential school system a little more than a year old, the sesquicentennial became both an opportunity for the telling of hard truths and a platform to showcase the resilience and dy- namism of Indigenous cultures that had endured the absolute worst, and had managed to recover and thrive.
Unceded is less a harangue over past ills than a monument to the things McMaster — a member of the Siksika First Nation — suggests. Four discrete sections knit into a holistic ex- perience: Resilience, Sovereignty, Colonization, Indigeneity. Each is punctuated with a video of an Indigenous person emerging from a swirl of forms, speaking directly to the viewer. All around, images both moving and still capture scenes from a vast land of mountains and plains, forests and sea, woven with vignettes of Indigenous culture, alive and well.
Among its most vibrant expressions is in the architectural world, where a new generation of Indigenous architects are forging new relationships with the act of building. There’s a ways to go yet — the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada lists only 12 members who identify as Indigenous — but Unceded means to move the needle, and on the world stage, McMaster said. That means acknowledging not only the work of Indigenous architects, but their unique position as stewards of environmental balance.
“So much of it is about the land, really,” he says. “People’s cultures and lives have been based on the land, and really, most of us have lost that connection — the built environment doesn’t reflect that. Unceded is really about the language of the land, and what it can teach us as we continue to build, going forward.” If there was ever a time to listen, it would be now. Unceded opens at the Venice Biennale of Architecture on Saturday. For more information, visit unceded.ca.