2025 Venice Biennale Architecture Shortlist
Announcing the shortlist of candidates in the running to represent Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture
The Canada Council is the Commissioner for Canada’s official representation at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia which seeks to support proposals with bold ideas that inspire, challenge and respond to current realities through the lens of contemporary Canadian architecture.
2025 Shortlist
Photo by André Leclerc
Pikkuminartut
Siila Watt-Cloutier, Nunavik Inuk, environmental, cultural and human rights defender, political leader and writer │ Dr. Heather Igloliorte, Nunatsiavut Inuk, curator and art historian, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices, University of Victoria │ Alain Fournier, architect, EVOQ Architecture │ Nicole Luke, Nunavut Inuk, architectural intern and curator, Verne Reimer Architecture │ Sylvia Cloutier, Nunavik Inuk, producer and co-director, TULUGAK │ Lisa Koperqualuk, Nunavik Inuk, curator, anthropologist, president of Inuit Circumpolar Council – Canada │Sami Tannoury, architect, EVOQ Architecture │ Isabelle Laurier, curator, EVOQ Architecture │ Sarah Watson, curator, executive director, La Guilde │ André Dudemaine, Innu, artistic director, Terres en vue
Pikkuminartut (Things that you want to own, that are desirable) is a group of mainly Inuit people, organizations, architects, curators, designers and multimedia artists. Through their personal and shared experiences, they have a vibrant history of presenting exhibitions that explore intersections of contemporary architecture, Inuit storytelling and art. This team at the forefront of Inuit expression and architectural co-creation intends to explore how the power and complexity of Inuit storytelling expand cultural knowledge around contemporary architecture on Inuit Nunangat lands.
Connecting responsible architecture to community history, values and vision is a growing universal and contemporary quest. This exhibition will offer a deep exploration of Inuit storytelling through the lens of contemporary airport architecture co-created in applying Inuit and non-Inuit knowledge. Nunavimmiut’s understanding of the world is central to this exhibition and is shared from situated experiences of home and away. The exhibition will bridge geographical and cultural distances as well as global environmental and human rights issues. It will be grounded in decolonizing histories and framed within provocative and necessary questions about the role and responsibility of contemporary architecture in Inuit Nunangat territories.
Photo by Kazeem Kuteyi
Mixtape Collective
Farida Abu-Bakare, director of global practice, WXY Studio │Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen, multi-hyphenate theatre artist and scholar │Tura Cousins Wilson, architect, co-founder, Studio of Contemporary Architecture │Kazeem Kuteyi, cultural curator, founder, New Currency │Alexandra Lambropoulos, project officer, Infrastructure Institute │Shane Laptiste, architect, co-founder, Studio of Contemporary Architecture │Phat Le, architectural designer, Infrastructure Institute │Reza Nik, architect, SHEEEP Studio │William Ukoh, multidisciplinary artist
The Mixtape Collective is a diverse crew of cultural instigators who are leading the global discourse in architecture and urbanism as it intersects with and conveys the complexities of multi-disciplined artistic expression. The team is composed of architects, urban planners, artists and cultural curators who are passionate about exploring the intricacies of art, culture and the built environment. The collective is committed to building bridges not just across communities, but across and within practices to reckon with contradictions inherent in contemporary Canadian architecture practice.
To build is to listen. How can radical acts of listening and reciprocity (re)imagine our sense of belonging? Our cities face the challenge of reflexively serving the multicultural communities they claim to represent and champion. Prescriptive architectural and urban planning practices and policies have fostered a landscape of disbelonging, erasure, and extraction rather than inclusion. This project challenges the politics and policies of sound shaping our cities while learning from the sonic landscapes of Indigenous and marginalized communities as they offer alternative pathways to designing shared spaces of belonging, resistance and joy.
FIELD+
Andrew King, founder, AK A/FLDWRK, Professor of Practice, McGill University School of Architecture │ Lev Bratishenko, curator and writer │Stephen Fai, director, Carleton Immersive Media Studio │Angela Silver, visual artist │Shauna McCabe, curator and director, Art Gallery of Guelph │Nedra Rodrigo, founder, Tamil Studies Symposium, York University │Matthew Hickey, architect, founder, Two Row Architect │Josh Taron, associate professor, University of Calgary’s School of Architecture
FIELD+ is a research and design collective that brings together AK A/FLDWRK, Andrew King’s 35 years of design and academic research practice and Lev Bratishenko’s 15 years of curatorial practice with a national network of collaborating curators, artists, researchers, teachers and activists who will grow with and through the project’s development. The mandate of the collective is to provoke architecture into responsible action and declaring its positions, and to question the norms of the biennial exhibition format.
The project is intended to provoke architecture to rethink natural abundance as obligation rather than privilege, starting from the Canadian landscape and its enduring fantasies. How can we engage responsibly with abundance in a country that identifies with a need to grow? Through a series of public provocations, seven themes will emerge through national collaborations before, during, and after the exhibition, turning the process and the pavilion into living spaces of production and connection open to more publics. We are abundant and heavy with responsibility; we must reconceptualize, redistribute, rearrange, and redesign in response, inviting a more hopeful, inclusive and just future.
Photo by Beda Schmid
Living Room Collective
Andrea Ling, architect, biodesigner, designGUILD, ETH Zurich │Nicholas Hoban, lecturer, director, Technology Services, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto │ Vincent Hui, associate professor, associate chair, Department of Architectural Science, Toronto Metropolitan University │Clayton Lee, director (artistic), Fierce Festival
Led by biodesigner Andrea Shin Ling, the Living Room Collective is a group of architects, scientists, artists and educators who work at the intersection of architecture, biology and digital fabrication technologies. The collective seeks to move society away from exploitative systems of production to regenerative ones by inventing design methods and processes that centre on natural systems. They intend to use the platform of the Venice Biennale to generate national and international conversations that ask: How does one fabricate a biological architecture? What are the conditions of stewardship? What are the strategies to instigate this at scale, regionally and globally?
The project is an ambitious, large-scale living pavilion that utilizes materials embedded with biologically active, living cells in an architectural context. Using innovative fabrication techniques, functionalities such as structural reinforcement and carbon sequestration will be integrated into living structures that are then tended to throughout their life cycle. In the face of climate collapse, the Living Room Collective proposes a new model of architecture that places regenerative processes and care at its core. The project seeks to upend an architectural legacy of a human-centred built environment, imagining a radically transformed future for both Canadian and global architecture.
KANVA + LAURENCE DAUPHINAIS
KANVA, architecture lead, original concept, production design │Laurence Dauphinais, independent curator
KANVA + LAURENCE DAUPHINAIS is composed of architects, designers and artists who have demonstrated a commitment to producing innovative and meaningful public projects through social engagement. KANVA, founded by Rami Bebawi and Tudor Radulescu, is an established multidisciplinary architectural firm, engaged in the promotion of a sensitive architecture based on a creative, open design approach. Laurence Dauphinais is a multidisciplinary creator, director, playwright, screenwriter and actor, with an affinity for integration of technology, who has produced interactive and participative narratives.
Our societies are confronted with innumerable challenges – social inequalities, ecological devastations, financial austerity, seclusion and overconsumption of resources. And in response, as an embedded symbol of growth, we build continuously. Paradoxically, there is a low rate of occupation within our built environment. Most existing spaces, with services and amenities, sit empty up to half the time, regardless of program. The notion of interstitial occupation is perhaps an opportunity to address these challenges. KANVA + LAURENCE DAUPHINAIS seek to fill these physical and societal voids with a bottom-up approach. Through digital engagement and the overlaying of a diversity of occupations in single places, architecture becomes a community actor for healing a polarized society and forging togetherness.