This text is part of the special section Museums
Presented at the Canadian Center for Architecture until February 2023, the exhibition Towards home explores how Inuit and Sámi peoples “inhabit” their ancestral territory.
There are about 20 Aboriginal architects in Canada, proof of their under-representation in the way they construct the space where they live and work. True to its mission of promoting architectural heritage and pursuing its reflection on the living environment, the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) is presenting this multidisciplinary and transversal exhibition, produced by a team of Inuit and Sámi co-curators.
Towards home revisits the occupation of northern indigenous territory as a place of spiritual belonging. The idea: to develop an architecture of the Arctic in a climate inspired by the way of life of the Aboriginals. Installations, photographs, paintings, animated images, soundtracks and narratives: the collective of artists behind the project approaches the subject through the representation of places of life and works of art relating to the link to the territory. And declines its reflection around three questions: Where is one at home? And, now, where are we going (central question)? Where does the territory begin? Questions that revolve around a postulate in the background: the indigenous sovereignty of the North.
Entering the autochthony of the North
Access to the exhibition is via a vestibule, the intermediate space between the interior and exterior of Inuit or Sami houses, where tools and accessories used on a daily basis are stored: mittens, amautiit (parkas for women), boots, snowshoes, sled, etc. Seal skin rubs shoulders with synthetic fiber; this transitional space is also at the crossroads between tradition and modernity, a reflection of today’s North. The scenographic lighting recreates the orientation of the full east sun at the entrance. All the ways of being “at home” are represented on archival lithographs — tents, teepees and prefabricated houses built in Nunavik by the federal government in the 1950s to settle this traditionally nomadic people.
From the vestibule, the visitor enters a theatricalization of the territory with the meanders of a river escaping on the ground near a prospector’s tent — the traveling house. A soundtrack spoken in Inuktitut is broadcast by an old radio, a link between the Inuit of the North and the Inuit of the South living in the big cities, thousands of kilometers from Inuit Nunangat (“place where the Inuit live”). Throughout the exhibition, we pass through many paintings, including three eloquent installations that speak of nomadism, the future and the conception of space as seen by members of Aboriginal communities.
Where are we at home?
Under a traditional 3D tent. Reimagined by Inuit artist Asinnajaq, originally from Inukjuak, for his documentary Three thousand (2017), it is a reinterpretation of the collective shelter installed in the heart of the northern tundra. As everywhere, you are allowed to touch, smell and manipulate the exhibits. We then take a seat in front of a luminous fireplace under a canvas whose print is taken from a macrophoto of mosses and lichens.
And now where are we going?
In the world of Carola Grahn, contemporary Sami artist. Its remarkable installation invites us to look at the future from an altar on which is placed a hollow birch trunk containing offerings for the future of the people. A suspended greenish veil recreates the undulation of an aurora borealis from which rings hang. In this room, the circle is omnipresent; for the Sámis, time is circular, linked to the passage of the seasons which gives rhythm to life in the territory.
Where does the territory begin?
In the dialogue of two Cree artists. On a video projected in large format, the two women wonder about the effects of colonization on belonging to the territory and the need to commit to Aboriginal sovereignty. On the walls, a collection of photos illustrates scenes taken in the community of Iqaluit, Nunavut, where nature is never far from the urban space. The displacement between the communities of the North and the cities of the South are at the heart of this iconographic representation.
Emerging artists at work
This special content was produced by the Special Publications team of the To have to, pertaining to marketing. The drafting of To have to did not take part.