In this talk, Alexis Kyle Mitchell presents an experimental and essayistic collage of archival footage, personal writing, scientific research, hand-processed film and specially commissioned sound scores that are part of her forthcoming feature film The Treasury of Human Inheritance.

Presented here for the first time, these diverse materials are attuned to the complex legacies of auto-ethnography in filmmaking, and to forms of embodied knowledge within alternative kinship structures.

The Treasury of Human Inheritance uses the body as both resource and material, performing ritualized repetitions as a method and mode of research into the inherited traits of familial genetic disease and disability.

Mitchell's talk is the last event in this term’s MVS Proseminar series.

Based between Canada and the UK, Alexis Kyle Mitchell often works collaboratively alongside artist Sharlene Bamboat as Bamboat | Mitchell. Mitchell recently completed a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Toronto, where she held an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She was artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-2017) and at the MacDowell Colony (2018) and was a fellow at Sommerakademie Paul Klee (2017-2019).

Recent screenings and exhibitions include Mercer Union in Toronto, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival & International Film Festival Rotterdam and an upcoming solo exhibition (Bambitchell) at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Recent writing and research can be read in Digital Lives in the Global City (UBC Press) and in Queer at Camp (Fordham University Press). In 2020-2022, Mitchell will hold a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Disability Studies at New York University under the supervision of Dr. Faye Ginsburg.

Still from The Treasury of Human Inheritance courtesy of Alexis Kyle Mitchell

Join us for a talk by Palestinian curator and writer Nasrin Himada on the subject of Cinema, Friendship, and the Epistolary. 

Himada’s practice is heavily influenced by their long-term friendships and by their many ongoing collaborations with artists, filmmakers and poets.

Their recent project For Many Returns experiments with writing as an act dictated by love and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground embodiment as method, desire as transformation and liberation through many forms.

Nasrin Himada currently holds the position of Associate Curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Their talk is part of the MVS Proseminar series and is co-presented with Images Festival. 

Building on fieldwork from 2015 to the present, this talk by Jeffery Hou of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington addresses how Taipei's “Open Green” Program, the latest iteration of community planning initiatives in the Taiwanese capital, transcends the established boundaries of urban communities and community design practices to turn placemaking into a vehicle for collaboration and social learning. In Hou's view, the outcomes and processes of the program suggest directions for the ongoing evolution of civic urbanism(s) in Asia. This talk is being held in collaboration with the Global Taiwan Studies Initiative at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto.

Jeffrey Hou is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and the director of the Urban Commons Lab at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work focuses on the agency of marginalized social groups in transforming the built environments. In a career that spans the Pacific, Hou has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers, fishers and villagers in Asia, as well as inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North American cities, on projects ranging from the conservation of wildlife habitats to bottom-up placemaking.  

Join Phyllis Lambert, legendary founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, for a discussion on the origins and composition of her latest book, entitled Observation Is a Constant That Underlies All Approaches.

Lambert founded the CCA in 1979, growing it into an international research institution and museum premised on the belief that architecture is a public concern.

After delivering her presentation, Lambert will take part in a q&a session with three members of the Daniels Faculty: Brian Boigon, Peter Sealy and Brigitte Shim. This will be followed by a q&a exchange with the audience. The event will be moderated by Juan Du, Dean of the Daniels Faculty. It will also be livestreamed on the Faculty’s YouTube channel.

An architect, author, photographer, conservation activist and critic of architecture and urbanism, Phyllis Lambert is Founding Director Emeritus of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).

Lambert inaugurated the field of architecture and photography with Photography and Architecture: 1839-1939 — the first book published by the CCA — and with a series of photographic commissions for her own publications and for the CCA beginning in the mid-1970s.

She was Director of Planning for the Seagram Building (1954-58) and awarded the Golden Lion of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, and she recently received the 2023 Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for Contribution to Architecture. 

Phyllis Lambert portrait © Alicia Lorente 

Landscapes are hard, all messy and complex. Sites are tough, many toxic and degraded. Neighbourhoods are complicated, uniquely layered and deserving. Good design isn’t enough: environmental regeneration, social equity, savvy resourcefulness and sheer joy are also required. Be it a coal mine, a shipyard, a city full of polluted soil and all sorts of abandoned sites, D.I.R.T. does what Cornelia Hahn Oberlander would do: dig deep, carefully and empathetically find, let form and process emerge from the place, and design the landscape with a vengeance.

Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized as an innovator in the design and building of regenerative landscapes. She founded D.I.R.T. studio to research, design and build projects with passion and rigour. Raised in New Jersey, Bargmann is forthright and unafraid to provoke debate to tease out what matters most about places. She is the inaugural recipient of the 2021 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Prize in Landscape Architecture, and has received the American Academy in Rome Prize and the National Design Award by the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum. After 30 years of teaching generations to take risks and do good, not just design, she was recently named Professor Emerita in Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

Since the 1970s, Frank Gehry has recast the understanding of building types such as the house and the museum as well as architecture at large. Yet his trajectory has been far from linear. As this year’s deliverer of the Daniels Faculty’s annual George Baird Lecture, Jean-Louis Cohen of The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University discusses how the design revolution that Gehry has fomented was prepared by years of research and a “no-rules” architecture, developed both in close contact with the city of Los Angeles’ artists and in opposition to its dominant firms. The talk will draw on Cohen’s own in-depth research into the architect’s archive, aimed at the publication of an eight-volume catalogue raisonné of Gehry’s sketches.

Trained as an architect and a historian, Jean-Louis Cohen has held the Sheldon H. Solow Chair for the History of Architecture at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts since 1994.  

He has curated numerous exhibitions and published more than 40 books, including Building a New New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (2020), Le Corbusier: The Built Work (2018), France: Modern Architectures in History (2015), Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes (2013), The Future of Architecture Since 1889 (2012), Architecture in Uniform (2011) and Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR (1992).  

In 2020, Cohen has published Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings, the first in a set of eight volumes produced by Cahiers d’Art.  

In this talk, the Toronto-based filmmaker, writer and geographer Brett Story will explore the relationship between research and creative practice, arguing for filmmaking as a mode of radical inquiry.

Sharing select scenes from her current project, a feature documentary charting the unlikely union-organizing trajectory of a small band of Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York, Dr. Story will discuss the geographies of scale, the precarity of current labour struggle, and the desire for the political as aesthetic form. 

For more information on Dr. Story and her body of work, visit her website.

This event is co-presented by Images Festival.

Human activity causes massive environmental changes across scales, including the spread of invasive species, climate change and biodiversity loss. However, understanding both these changes and their trajectories into the future can be challenging, yet is paramount to targeting conservation action. In this lecture, Brian Leung of the Department of Biology at McGill University will discuss his attempts to understand and forecast invasive pest spread and biodiversity loss at global, continental and regional levels, presenting his insights, the main challenges and some reasons for cautious optimism. 

Brian Leung is an Associate Professor at McGill University, UNESCO Chair for Dialogues on Sustainability and Director of the Neotropical Environment Option (NEO) graduate program, a collaborative program between McGill and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). His research focuses on predictive, integrative modelling under uncertainty, and has included global, country-scale and regional ecological forecasts, bio-economic risk analysis, management and policy as well as development of theoretical tools. He has worked across terrestrial, aquatic and marine biomes. 

Featuring Tura Cousins Wilson of SOCA, Jessica Kirk of the Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism and Jessica Hines of Black Urbanism Toronto, this conversation about what it means to take accountability within the practice of design and focus on Black community engagement is the first in a series centred around Blackness in architecture, landscape, and design within academia. As noted in the University Commitment in the Scarborough Charter, the work of Black flourishing and thriving should “be informed, shaped and co-created by communities” in order to be effective. Other discussions in this series will include Black Flourishing through Design (February 15), a workshop for designers and educators called Blackness in Architectural Pedagogy and Practice (March 1) and a student-led online event that centres Black belonging through design.

This event will be moderated by Assistant Professor Anne-Marie Armstrong of the Daniels Faculty. Poet and playwright Greg Birkett will also perform a special spoken-word piece.

Tura Cousins Wilson is a co-founder and principal of the Studio of Contemporary Architecture (SOCA), a Toronto-based practice focused on inclusive city building and beautiful spaces. As an architect, Tura has experience in various scales and types of projects, including housing, cultural spaces, heritage and urban design. He is also passionate about small-scale architecture and the craft of residential design.

Jessica Kirk is a cultural worker, creative and organizer based in Toronto. She is the Executive Director of Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism and a member of Black Lives Matter Canada, both dedicated to supporting Black liberation efforts in Toronto and across Turtle Island. Kirk is also a co-founder of Way Past Kennedy Road, a grassroots art collective supporting marginalized artists. Holding an MA in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto, she focuses her work on community care and expression.

Jessica Hines is an acclaimed business psychologist, utilizing her MSc in International Business Management and BA in Psychology to assist immigrant and small businesses in the Caribbean and Canada.

Greg Birkett is a Torono-based poet and playwright. Two of his plays, Do You Remember Me and Pieces of a Black Woman’s Soul, were performed at the Toronto Fringe Festival and for sold-out audiences at the Sandbox Theatre in downtown Toronto respectively.

Based in Algiers and Barcelona, artist Lydia Ourahmane will be discussing recent work, including her 2022 exhibition Tassili, which is the fourth commission in Mercer Union’s Artist First program. At the centre of the exhibition is a moving image work filmed in Tassili n’Ajjer, a Sahara plateau in southeastern Algeria.

Once a fertile “plateau of rivers,” as the translation of its name implies, the region is now an arid expanse of desert that is inhospitable to the many forms of life previously known to thrive there. Ourahmane, together with a group of collaborators and local guides, journeyed on foot for thirteen days to a part of Tassili n’Ajjer near the border of Algeria and Libya. Both the group’s footage and movement are at the centre of Ourahmane’s exhibition at Mercer Union, which marks the first presentation of her work in Canada.

Learn more about the exhibition here.
Learn more about the event here.

Banner images: Views from Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili, SculptureCenter, New York, 2022. Photos by Charles Benton.