
Based in Montreal, The Canadian Centre for Architecture is known for addressing architecture in an international context. According to CCA Collection associate director Martien de Vletter, however, that international focus creates a blind spot in the institution’s own role within Montreal and its home in greater Québec and North America.
“I think for a long time we were mainly focused on what happened elsewhere,” de Vletter says. “Now, I think we’re in a very interesting moment in time for the CCA; in Canada, there’s a lot going on in terms of the relationship with Indigenous communities, where I think we have a story to tell—not just we but with other people.”
In 2020, the institution began to consider what it might look like to collaborate with Indigenous researchers and artists to tell that story, a consideration that grew into Living Lands—a land-acknowledgment working group that, since 2021, has produced residencies, exhibitions, and fellowships that deepen relationships between CCA and Indigenous communities, while providing opportunities to address colonization and reparation. Importantly, Living Lands offers a different kind of land acknowledgment, an ongoing discourse regarding histories of dispossession and redistribution of resources.

Beginning in 2020, CCA assembled the Living Lands team, made up of museum staff and members of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, that resulted in an exhibition, / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home. Led by a group of Inuit, Sámi, and settler co-curators, the exhibition and subsequent publication, according to CCA, “examines and celebrates practices of designing and building on the land that empower Indigenous communities.”
Living Lands also established a biennial fellowship for Indigenous artists and researchers that was awarded to multidisciplinary performance artist Ange Loft, from the Kahnawà:ke Kanien’kehá:ka Territory, for 2021–22. The group created an inaugural research assistant position; an initiative with their masters students program inviting graduate students to expand upon issues of the built environment and colonization; and ongoing programs and workshops in conjunction with the Towards Home exhibition that produce new materials by Indigenous designers, which will then be incorporated into CCA’s collection. “All of these little pieces together make a different story to tell now,” de Vletter says.

Each initiative combines to produce a “living” land acknowledgment: Unlike many land acknowledgments in the United States that manifest as statements “nodding” to past Indigenous sovereignty and the histories of violent dispossession, CCA’s Living Lands generates ongoing uncoverings and dialogues—exhibitions that grow and transform, workshops that generate new material—that, says Rafico Ruiz, CCA director of research, move toward a redistribution of resources.
“Because all the work we do including exhibitions is a form of research, that implies actual transfer of tangible resources to Indigenous designers, as researchers,” Ruiz says. “I hope, at its best, acknowledgment is an actual engagement with both histories of dispossession and ongoing dispossession, which is an endless project.”
“As a cultural institution, you have an opportunity to bring forward questions or issues that other people are not yet asking, or are asking but don’t have the words or the visual components to bring forward,” de Vletter says. “I do think you have two options: You’re addressing the issue, or you’re not addressing it. If you’re not addressing it, it’s a choice. And that is also a political standpoint.”





This article first appeared in the October issue of ARCHITECT.