The Canadian Centre for Architecture welcomes applications for two virtual fellowships, each held for a six-week period. Fellowships can take place either between March and May or September and December. The format of the fellowship supports our long-term investment in thinking through how digitized CCA Collection material can generate new historical configurations and timely interpretations, and how it can have a broader reach within architecture research. The Virtual Fellowship Program runs alongside our Research Fellowship Program to increase the accessibility of the CCA Collection.

The 2023 edition of the Virtual Fellowship Program, Embodied Visions: Photography Beyond the Technical Image, invites new directions, readings, and interactions with the photographic works held in our Collection with a view to charting how broader understandings of ‘vision’ may exceed what Vilém Flusser names the ‘technical image.’ The program seeks to position vision and its diverse practices, media, and archives as an open terrain for investigation that can exceed human proprioception and move towards expanded modes of embodiment (algorithmic, land-based, and more). Vision and image-making are intertwined ways of perceiving, experiencing, and capturing the world.

The two selected 2023 Virtual Fellows will undertake research that puts the CCA Collection into conversation with material held elsewhere in order to explore how the contemporary built environment engenders practices of documentation that emerge from human and non-human agents. These ways of looking, sensing, feeling, and experiencing the conditions of architecture may become a form of mediation that in the next decade will become as consequential as physical architectures in the world (e.g. the current trend towards ‘digital twins’ in urban planning). Fellows will work through the CCA Collection to situate how architecture has historically been documented, visualized, and witnessed by an array of human and non-human actors (whether sentient and/or elemental that can collectively redefine the fundamental premises of architecture and its forms of representation). Fellows may also identify materials in the existing Collection documenting more diverse worlding practices, for instance informal/Indigenous architectures that were marginalized, deemed ‘irrational’ or devoid of agency, exoticized and/or transformed by colonial ‘development.’

Through these lines of inquiry, Virtual Fellows may address a range of topics that probe embodied visions and agents, particularly when it comes to documenting the accelerating changes of the built environment under the conditions of global warming and broader climate change phenomena. These topics might include:

• Redefinitions of architectural agency and representational practices, including the non-human and the non-technical image

• Understandings of ’vision’ as embodied, land-based, collective and non-representational

• Notions of architectural photography that are premised on active use, age, decay, and sociality

• Explorations of diverse (analog) lineages in relation to digital rendering and machine vision

• Detangling and revisiting of imperialist encounters recorded in photographs as a method of repair

The 2023 Selection Committee included Hester Keijser (Curator of Photography and New Media, CCA), Rafico Ruiz (Associate Director, Research, CCA), Estelle Blaschke (University of Basel), and Andrea Stultiens (Photographer/Royal Academy of Art, The Hague).

The call for applications is now closed. The next call for the 2024 Virtual Fellowship Program will be issued in July 2023.

For questions regarding the program, please contact studium@cca.qc.ca.

For updates on the program, please subscribe to the CCA newsletter.

Emily Cheng
Independent architect/artist
“See Here: Interrogating the Photographs of Felice Beato”

Emma Martin
Independent artist
“Land and Sky: DEW Line Sensors as Colonial Development”

2022: Papers that Remain: Post-Custodial Archives on the Continent

Wafa Mohammed Ali
University of Khartoum
“The Whereabouts of Sudan’s Public Works Archive”

Nokubekezela Mchunu
University of the Witwatersrand
“Cultural hermeneutics as a framework for the reform of former exclusionary spatial and institutional enclaves in a postdemocratic South Africa”

2021: Building Matter

Marina Oba
Federal University of Paraná
“Building ephemeral matter in the Georg Lippsmeier collection”

James Graham
California College of the Arts
“Planetary Dam”

Maren Koehler
University of Sydney
“Paper, Pulp and Plywood, ca. 1967”