As part of Volume 37 of Site Magazine and in conjunction with the 2017 celebration of Canada’s sesquicentennial, the editors invite submissions to a juried competition that projects the theme of 'Future Legacy' into Canada’s next 150 years. We are looking for design responses that take a position on the future history of a national project and offer perspectives on the role of legacy as a driving force in the creation of the nation.. What parts of the past drive us into the future? What scales of time influence our view of the passage of history? What do we pick up and what do we leave behind?
The competition asks for a re-evaluation of the Canadian national project across multiple lines. Entries may consider various scales of site and time—addressing patterns of use and place from the scale of the human to the geological scale. Canada has many readings—entrants are encouraged to identify and articulate specific legacies for investigation, considering elements including history, memory, events, marks of passage, physical and ephemeral traces of the past in both the landscape and built environments, recurring themes, heritage, identifying terms, definitions of belonging, and sites of conflict and contestation. Entries may celebrate, critique, challenge, and reinvent those legacies through a design proposition for Canada’s future legacy.
Into this geographically, ecologically, and infrastructurally defined territory come questions of belonging, citizenship, and transit. Who gets to hold the identity of the nation going forward? How do cliché markers of national belonging fit into identities fractured and multiplied by displacements, generations, ideologies, and personal histories? Whose nation achieves the status of sovereign, of state? And how do the forms of sovereignty that emerged at the end of the 19th century change to meet the challenges of the 21st when between the two lies a period defined by colonial reorganization and schisms that erupted on regional, religious, ethnic, and linguistic lines? How do shifting nations affect the future prognosis of the nation state? If not a nation, what might we be?
As we re-think memory and history in terms of different scales and placements in time, we begin to see these relationships to the past as active forces, ones that determine the affective aspect of the nation. Set to the task of creating national feeling, memory begins to structure ideology, with consequences for the development and delineation of space and time in ways calculated to ascribe and remove power from individuals, groups, places, and narratives. Selected projects will address this malleable ground, offering future visions for Canada that challenge the idea of a static timeline for the nation, visions that intervene in the assumed causality of historical narratives.
We encourage submissions that engage with the following themes, sites and their definitions and implications for Future Legacies.
Title
Call for Entries: Future Legacy CompetitionType
Competition Announcement (Ideas)Website
Organizers
Submission Deadline
February 12, 2017 11:59 PMVenue
CanadaPrice
Free