We will host a live Q&A on Instagram Friday, 3 July, at 1:00pm Montréal time (7:00pm Central European Time). Questions for the Q&A may be submitted to public@cca.qc.ca or left as comments on YouTube.

The word ‘collaborative’ should make you as suspicious as the word ‘sustainable’ since both are used to vindicate projects and relationships. But appearing collaborative, like appearing to be happy in the office, is a condition of professional employability, and so the word seems unavoidable and even empty, especially for architects who can’t make a project on their own anyway. At the same time, we hear more and more about ‘collectives.’ Both concepts reflect a society anxious that its mounting crises have something to do with unchecked individualism.

Architects are traditionally uncomfortable with acknowledging their dependence on other actors, so My Invisible Friend invites them to present projects made with non-architects and to reveal the invisible friends without whom their work would be impossible. Each speaker completes three tasks:

1: Tell the story of a decisive encounter with a figure from outside architecture and of how it created a new kind of practice.
2: Pick any dead or fictional non-architect to collaborate with, and explain why.
3: Pick another contemporary architect and a collaborator to inflict upon them, and explain why.

Plan Común was founded in Santiago, Chile, in 2012, one year after the rise of a student movement against the inequalities of the neoliberal culture. Since the end of 2018, Plan Común has been based in Paris and led by four partners: Kim Courrèges, Felipe De Ferrari, Sacha Discors, and Nissim Haguenauer. Their practice is determined by critical discourse, research, design, and building. They have taught at Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad Mayor, and Marne-la-Vallée Architecture School, and lectured internationally.