Angirramut / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home

What could home become across Inuit Nunangat, Sápmi, and the North more broadly when defined by Indigenous architects and designers?

We announce the CCA’s 2022 curatorial project Angirramut / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home led by the perspectives of Inuit, Sámi, and settler co-curators centring northern Indigenous forms of sovereignty. Co-curated by Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, and Rafico Ruiz, the project takes shape as an exhibition, a publication, a design workshop, and a summer festival.

With Angirramut / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home, the CCA explores how Inuit, Sámi, and other communities across the Arctic are creating self-determined spaces that rely on land-based practices. The project fosters understandings of placemaking that emerge from listening and exchange across languages, communities, design practices, and lands.

This multimedia and multi-format project begins with the acknowledgement that the work of deepening the architectural field’s engagement with Indigenous designers and their communities must centre the experiences of being at home on the land—and as such privilege lived experience and dialogue in its many forms. Historically, architecture has been a tool of oppression for many Indigenous communities; subverting this relationship requires supporting northern Indigenous design knowledges, specifically those rooted in living on and with the land, which inform Indigenous-led approaches to the contemporary practice of architecture.

“This idea of looking towards home from a perspective—from what perspective? It is a challenge to recreate a personal idea of home, which is really subjective and which exists within our psyches. But from my experience in visiting other people’s homes, I’ve come to understand there are a lot of commonalities as to what home consists of. So this idea of a memoryscape is definitely part of my work, but it’s also an amalgamation of ideals, whether they exist as memories or whether they’re projected onto the possibilities of a home. How do we approach that challenge of trying to communicate that—those differences—within the closed space of a gallery?” asks contributing artist Geronimo Inutiq.

To open the space of its galleries to these questions, the CCA along with the co-curators ask how to above all produce a welcoming platform for dialogue firstly among Indigenous communities across the North, and also with diverse non-Indigenous publics.

In the galleries, wall text is grounded in open questions that foreground conversations across communities and lands. Each room fosters relationships among architects, duodji, and artists from Inuit Nunangat and Sápmi. Indigenous ways of working are often passed down through oral tradition by Elders and knowledge-keepers. How do we record these forms of embodied knowledge, to impart them to future generations? How can the space of the CCA be given not only to these questions, but to these practices as well? 

The exhibition and co-curatorial team mobilize the CCA as a creative platform for newly commissioned works by asinnajaq, Carola Grahn, Geronimo Inutiq, Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, including a new iteration of the Sámi Architectural Library, a radio broadcast program, and dialogues between sounds, images, and perspectives. The co-curatorial team is pursuing questions around Indigenous-led design through the CCA as a dialogue partner and convenor of this exciting group of designers and artists. 

These bodies of work also interact with institutions and infrastructures outside of Montréal: the Avataq Cultural Institute, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq have generously provided loans that enter into this dialogue with new commissions and live programming. 

In the lead-up to this exhibition, the CCA conceived and launched the Futurecasting: Indigenous-led Architecture and Design in the Arctic workshop series that was co-curated by Nicole Luke, Inuit Futures Ilinniaqtuk at the CCA, and Ella den Elzen, Curatorial Assistant at the CCA. In January 2022, a group of nine early career architectural designers and duodji met to discuss the future of design on Indigenous land, and meet again during a workshop this April 2022 in Kautokeino, Sápmi (Norway). The gallery dedicated to the Futurecasting project serves as a record of, and platform for, these conversations, ideas, and structures. 

Living Land Acknowledgement
Beginning in April 2021, the CCA formed an internal Land Acknowledgement Working Group to facilitate its long journey toward fostering affirmative relationships with Indigenous and other peoples across Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. This Living Land Acknowledgement continues to be informed by the programming and dialogue ensuing from Angirramut / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home.

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The CCA gratefully acknowledges the support of the ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Nordic Culture Point, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and the SAW Gallery.