Description:

This seminar will focus on Architects Against Housing Alienation's Not for Sale campaign, which occupied the Canadian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture. The campaign understands settler-colonial property relations as the original violence that underlies contemporary housing inequalities. Only by addressing Indigenous housing alienation will it be possible to address urban housing problems. The seminar will examine the campaign's ten demands as a framework to address different aspects of the national housing problem.

About the presenter:

Adrian Blackwell is an artist, designer, theorist, and educator, whose work focuses on the relation between physical spaces and political economic forces. His art and design have been exhibited across Canada, in the United States, and at the Shenzhen and Chengdu Biennales, Shanghai Urban Space Art Season, Toronto Biennial of Art, Chicago Architecture Biennial. He is one of six co-organizers of Architects Against Housing Alienation's Not for Sale! campaign, which occupied the Canadian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture and co-editor with David Fortin of issue 12/13 of Scapegoat: Architecture/ landscape/ political economy–"c\a\n\a\d\a: delineating nation state capitalism". Blackwell has taught architecture and urbanism at Chongqing, Michigan, Toronto, and Harvard Universities, and is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture.