The city has traditionally been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations, even of civilizations. With the rise of the mega city, however; with the advent of 24 x 7 rush hours; with the inexorable conversion of public space into commercial space; with the rise of surveillance; with the computer-assisted precision of redlining; with the viral advance of the xenophobic, the contemporary city is weighted down. We dream of something more. Not some something planned and canned, like another confectionary spectacle. Not something that will just perform change on us, like an operation, but something that can respond to our dreams; transform with us.
Panelists will present work and ideas about the city as not only an emergent space of information flows but also a site that is dynamically reactive, in flux with feedback.
Informal Architectures: A Symposium on Contemporary Art, Architecture and Spatial Culture
October 27, 2004 October 31, 2004
Presented by the Banff International Curatorial Institute and Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre.
Informal Architectures is an international, inter-disciplinary symposium that will examine issues around the representation of space in contemporary art, visual culture and architecture. The study of spatial culture at this event deals with the built environment in the broadest sense. Informal Architecture will explore the interplay between human imagination, and the spaces we have made for ourselves to live in: buildings, landscapes, gardens, museums, libraries, galleries, monuments, maps, cyberspace - as well as the artworks and writings constructed around such environments. If we understand structures - physical or imagined spaces - as containers of memory and cultural/social meaning, the study of space as culture opens up multiple discourses. Informed by art, architecture, fiction, landscape, geography, history and philosophy, this symposium will investigate contingency, failure, weakness and the unbuilt or unbuildable as analogical and metaphorical tools in better understanding the representation of space.
This symposium will propose a series of questions of interest to artists, curators, and architects, questions that are ultimately relatable and relevant to broader publics. The unbuilt in this context extends beyond the literal sense of structures that fall down - although the resonances of such architectural catastrophes are notable following September 11, 2001. Such icons are emblematic of how the subjects of this symposium touch on knowledge that extends beyond the proceedings of an academic conference.
Discussions will include:
Informal Space and Popular Imagination
Nomadism and Mobility
Ephemeral Spaces
Memory, Nostalgia, Utopia
Curating and architecture
And more...
Presentations: Dan Graham, Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto), Mark Wasiuta & Marcos Sanchez, Marjetica Potr_, Lucy Gunning, Andrea Phillips, Lida Abdullah, Marie-Paule MacDonald, Trevor Boddy, Marcos Novak, Jeffrey Huang, Sandra Buckley, FILUM (Sarah Bonnemaison & Christine Macy), Alexander Pilis, Gregory Cowan, Sean Topham, Robert Kronenburg, Ana Rewakowicz, Aoife MacNamara, Paul Antick, Centre for Land Use Interpretation (Erik Knutzen), Bernie Miller, Kourosh Mahvash, Alexandra McIntosh, Jeanne Randolph, Lance Blomgren, David Ross & Rebecca Duclos, Rita McKeough, Cory Lund, Stuart Reid, Doug Moffat, Ehryn Torrell, Sigrid Dahle, Leah Garnett, Shauna McCabe, Adrienne Lai, Gailan Ngan, Dennis J. Evans, Knowles Eddy Knowles, Ryan Nordlund, Andrew Kearney, Vessna Perunovich, Andrew King, David Hoffos and others.
Wednesday, October 27
7:30 p.m. Welcoming reception:
8:30 p.m. Keynote Address: Dan Graham
Since his first solo show at the John Daniels Gallery in 1969, Dan Graham has exhibited internationally in four Documentas (1972, 1977, 1982 and 1992) and in solo shows and mid-career retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Fundação de Serralves, Porto. A Conceptual artist, Graham emerged as a pioneer of performance and video art in the early 1960s. By the 1970s, he had begun working with quasi-architectural structures, the body of work for which he is best known. Born in 1942 in Illinois, Graham lives and works in New York.
Thursday, October 28
All day time events at Lux Cinema, Wolf and Bear Street Mall (downtown Banff)
9:00 a.m: Introductory Remarks: Anthony Kiendl, Director Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery and the Banff International Curatorial Institute
9:15 a.m. Keynote Address: Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow
Founded in 1992 by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, Atelier Bow-Wow are leaders of a new generation of Tokyo architects that promote a site-and use-specific approach to design. Their practice re-evaluates the current architectural character of Tokyo in an attempt to achieve a more responsive urbanism through the adaptability and mutative qualities of architecture. Atelier Bow-Wows design proposals include Manga Pod, a structure for relaxation installed at the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea. Manga Pod is made out of recycled magna comic books and a flexible shelving unit -- the joints flex to adapt to the movement of its users illustrating the firms interest in the utility and context of architecture. Their series of small houses in Tokyo are well designed residences on small sites that are integrated into the urban landscape.
10:30 a.m. Panel 1: Ephemeral Spaces
Ephemeral Spaces examines notions around the representation, interpretation and creation of spaces that are ephemeral, transitory or immaterial. Space in its various iterations has been increasingly defined as a product of subjective projection and interpretation, as opposed to a stable container or formal structure. This panel will look at how structures may evade, surpass, or question formal necessities and planned or inherited meanings. By looking around the edges of spatial culture, one may better understand its centre. Similarly, what do weak, contingent or ephemeral spaces tell us about the built, monumental and formal? How do interactions of people within space reveal meaning? While forms do change over time, so do meanings attached to those forms. How do performative acts relate to, change or transcend built spaces?
Moderator: Mark Wasiuta
Presenters: Andrea Phillips, Lucy Gunning and Marjetica Potr
11:45-12:30 p.m. Break Out Session
Animateurs: Mark Soo & Shauna McCabe
12:30-2:00 p.m. Lunch
2:00 p.m. Panel 2: Informal Space and the Popular Imagination
Where French writer Georges Bataille thought about authoritarian representations such as monuments and their implications to society, French theorist Michel Foucault thought in terms of spatial planning. Certainly, the events of September 11, 2001 changed contemporary culture. In many ways the iconographic and emotive power of media images such as 9/11 still cast a shadow on the popular imagination. But even earlier, as theorist Anthony Vidler suggests, anxious visions of the modern subject can be traced back to the 19th century. Even in the aftermath of the First World War, one caught in modern spatial systems tried to make architectural and representational sense of his or her predicament. Arguably, the World Trade Center embodied Modernist space, and such monumental structures are constructive and reinforcing of modern politics, social and ecological concerns. During this panel, artists, critics and curators will probe the dimensions of contemporary social, imaginary and lived spaces through various manifestations in art and the built environment.
Moderator: Anthony Kiendl
Presenters: Lida Abdullah, Mark Wasiuta and Marcos Sanchez, Marie-Paule MacDonald and Trevor Boddy
5:30 7:30 p.m. Bear Street Construction an ephemeral exhibition and performance event curated by Alexandra McIntosh and Trevor Boddy. Bear Street Construction will investigate architecture in the process of material formation, in order to engage the hidden dimensions of creating and experiencing built form.
5:30 p.m. Symposium participants are invited to attend the opening reception for Bear Street Construction at Crag Cabin, a '28 logs-high' heritage building soon to be relocated to the Bison Courtyard. Wine and wild mint ginger tea will be served.
6:00 p.m. Test Site, Bear Street Construction's exhibition opens for viewing in a nearby alley: once a design-stage testing area for Bison Courtyard, now transformed into a curatorial space.
7:00 p.m. Performance: Special one-time only performance at the Bison Courtyard construction site by Rita McKeough of Halifax and David Hoffos of Lethbridge.
Friday, October 29
All day time events at Lux Cinema, Wolf and Bear Street Mall (downtown Banff)
9:00 a.m. Architecture Parallax: Visual Crisis The Blind Architect by Alexander Pilis
10:30 a.m. Panel 3: Memory, Nostalgia, Utopia
If modernity entails a rupture in historical consciousness, then one of its byproducts is a collective nostalgia for older apparently more settled - ways of life, and for the spaces, places and buildings within which those lives were situated. Similarly the materiality of the built environment can provide an opportunity to reconstitute aspects of imagined histories through a series of often highly irrational encounters with it. By looking at art, curatorial, historical and architectural practices concerned with the traffic between the experience of everyday life and the physical, cultural and emotional transformation of the environment, the panel considers how our built and imagined environments inform the realization of personal and collective histories, the formation of memory and the constitution of nostalgia.
11:45 a.m. Break Out Session
Animateurs: Sigrid Dahle & Alexandra McIntosh
12:30-2:00 p.m. Lunch
2:00 p.m. Panel 4: Nomadism and Mobility
Mobile architecture represents one of the oldest forms of the built environment. The Plains Indians, for example, recognized the potentiality in placelessness: the most important feature of their homes was their impermanence. This impermanence meant that they could easily accommodate changing conditions, whether social or environmental. This geographical mobility continues to be viewed as a source of freedom. Motor homes and travel trailers, first marketed in the 1920s, still function as an architecture of escape and artists, architects and theorists (from the Situationists to Deleuze & Guattari) have appropriated nomadic forms in the belief that architecture that is not rigid or monumental embodies the potential to transform society. Panelists will present ideas and works on architecture and impermanence its root in Indigenous practices and its failures, histories and potentialities in contemporary culture.
Moderator: Candice Hopkins
Presenters: Gregory Cowan, Christine Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison (FILUM), Robert Kronenberg and Sean Topham
3:45 p.m. Break Out Session
Animateurs: Jeanne Randolph & Adrienne Lai
5:00 p.m. Ana Rewakowicz Inflatable Room Installation, Banff Avenue
9:00 p.m. Places/Remember/Events:David HoffosAndrew KearneyKourosh Mahvash
October 28 & 29, The Other Gallery, Glyde Hall
Tentative axes for an architecture of the secret and concealed n __ s Topical History: Places Remember Events Barely a suggestion, James Joyces scratches in the margins of Ulysses, his modernist reconstruction of the itinerary of The Odyssey, and a hint of the sedimentation of memory woven within landscape, the inseparability of time and space. w __ e David Hoffos, Andrew Kearney and Kourosh Mahvash explore space as accumulation, as palimpsest layers of memory and forgetting. Choosing threshold sites of dream, trauma, and mysticism to explore the faint but perceptible traces left within landscape, each artists work illuminates opaque levels of unconsciousmemory and association, vision and dream.
Curated by Shauna McCabe.
Reception Friday October 29th, 9 pm.
9 p.m. Open Studios: Informal Architecture Residency Glyde Hall and Jeanne and Peter Lougheed building.
Saturday, October 30
8:15 a.m. Group hike up Tunnel Mountain (Optional)
Morning events at Lux Cinema, Wolf and Bear Street Mall (downtown Banff)
Afternoon events at Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building, The Banff Centre.
9:30 a.m. Panel 5: City as Interface
Since time immemorial the city has been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations, even of civilizations. With the rise of the mega city, however; with the advent of 24 x 7 rush hours; with the inexorable conversion of public space into commercial space; with the rise of surveillance; with the computer-assisted precision of redlining; with the viral advance of the xenophobic, the contemporary city is weighted down. We dream of something more. Not some something planned and canned, like another confectionary spectacle. Not something that will just perform change on us, like an operation, but something that can respond to our dreams; transform with us.
Panelists will present work and ideas about the city as not only an emergent space of information flows but also a site that is dynamically reactive, in flux with feedback.
Moderator: Steve Dietz
Presenters: Marcos Novak, Jeffrey Huang and Sandra Buckley
10:30 a.m. Break Out Session
Animateurs: David Ross & Katie Spicer
12:30 p.m. Lunch Banff Centre Dining Hall
2:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m., Poster Sessions
These 20 minute presentations run simultaneously in three spaces: JPL room 204, Telus Studio and Rice Television Studio, Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building, The Banff Centre.
2:00 2:20 Kourosh Mahvash,Alex McInstosh, Jeanne Randolph
2:20 2:40 Lance Blomgren, David Ross & Rebecca Duclos, Cory Lund
2:40 3:00 Stuart Reid, Doug Moffat, Ehryn Torrell
3:00 3:20 Sigrid Dahle, Leah Garrett, Shauna McCabe
3:40 4:00 Adrienne Lai, Gailan Ngan, Dennis J. Evans
4:00 4:20 Knowles Eddy Knowles, Ryan Nordlund, Andrew Kearney
4:20 4:40 Vessna Perunovich, Andrew King, David Hoffos
4:40 5:00 Rita McKeough, Alexander Pilis
5:00 p.m. Closing reception for Bungalow Blitz with Curator Aoife MacNamara and artists Paul Antick and Andrew Kearney and Welcoming reception for new Walter Phillips Gallery Curator Sylvie Gilbert
9:00 p.m. All Hallows Eve Masquerade Ball, Jeanne and Peter Lougheed building and Glyde Hall
Sunday, October 31
11:00 a.m. 12:30 p.m. Seminar: Curatorial Constructions + Pathways
Roundtable discussion focused on curatorial practice and spatial culture
Rice Studio, Jeanne and Peter Lougheed building, The Banff Centre
