Aiming to continuously rethink and re-examine the scope and the boundaries of “curating architecture,” the CCA solicits ideas for projects that take innovative curatorial approaches and experimental formats.

The Emerging Curator Residency Program offers the opportunity to propose and curate a project at the CCA related to contemporary debates in architecture, urban issues, landscape design, and cultural and social dynamics while completing a residency at the CCA.

We encourage a wide range of proposals for curatorial projects. Proposals must bring an innovative curatorial model to the contemporary discourse on architecture. We seek proposals that use the curatorial project as a tool to foster ideas, to question relevant positions, to introduce new research themes, and to critique current modalities, with the ultimate goal of advancing new thinking for architecture and the built environment. Particular attention will be given to projects that intend to locate the discourse of architecture within a broader context across disciplines and practices, and that also point to overlooked areas of knowledge or engage with plural and diverse voices.

The output of the proposal may follow many trajectories, and the result may be as varied as an editorial project, a program of seminars and research colloquiums, a series of public events or workshops, a collection-based project, the production of content for the web and social media, a documentary film, or a physical or virtual exhibition. Interdisciplinary and collaborative practices are encouraged. The proposal must be explicit about the choice and relationship of format with content.

The Emerging Curator Residency Program includes a mentorship period that ensures the final candidates’ understanding of CCA culture and curatorial procedures. We will select three finalists who will be mentored remotely by the CCA curatorial team over a two-month period in September–October 2024. During this time, the finalists will fine-tune their project proposal and receive constructive feedback. At the end of this two-month period, we will re-evaluate the three projects and choose one to develop and produce in collaboration with the selected Emerging Curator. The other two finalists whose projects will not be realized will have the opportunity to publish their research as an article on our website. The CCA Emerging Curator Residency Program is an occasion for motivated individuals who seek experience in reflecting on the role of architecture discourse within the context of a cultural institution.

The selected candidate will be asked to complete a three-month residency at the CCA to develop and implement the project with our team. During the residency, the candidate will become further acquainted with the CCA’s institutional knowledge and vision, explore the institution’s resources and the collection holdings, and develop their curatorial vision to produce the proposed project while receiving guidance towards the project’s realization. The residency should take place between January 2025 and June 2025. The project should be completed by the end of 2026.

The CCA Emerging Curator Residency Program aims to nurture a new generation of cultural practitioners who are builders of institutions and communities.

The call for applications for the 2024-2025 program is now closed. The next call for applications for the 2025-2026 program will open in February 2025.

Architects, journalists, designers, critics, historians, photographers, artists, and other scholars and professionals thirty (30) years of age or younger on 1 January 2024 are eligible for this program, regardless of citizenship or place of residence.

The three finalists will receive a support fee of CAD 1,000 for their participation during the mentorship period (approx. 10h/week over two months). The final recipient will receive CAD 12,000 to cover travel, housing, and living expenses for a three-month residency in Montréal. These payments are subject to the income tax laws of Canada and Québec. The production cost of the project will be funded by the CCA. The languages in use at the CCA are English and French, though projects are welcome to engage additional languages.

Collective or collaborative projects are welcome; however, financial support will remain the same and will need to be shared among the collective.

All submissions must be new projects, never before presented, published, or realized.

The scope of the project and specific timing of the residency will be determined in consultation with members of the CCA’s curatorial committee. No more than one project per applicant will be accepted.

We will select finalists according to the following criteria: originality of the curatorial statement and approach, relevance to architectural thinking and practice, expertise and trajectory of the candidate, feasibility, and relevance to the curatorial direction and vision of the CCA.

All applicants will be notified in June 2024.

A final agreement will be effective only after the selected recipient has obtained all required authorization from the immigration authorities of both Québec and Canada.

For more information, please send an email to curatorialopportunities@cca.qc.ca. The diversity of our institution is at the core of our creativity and strengthens our research efforts. While all qualified candidates are invited to apply, we particularly welcome applications from persons with disabilities, Indigenous, Black, and other people of colour, of all genders, and LGBTQ+ persons. Applicants who require accommodations for any part of the application process can contact vsamson@cca.qc.ca to receive confidential assistance.

This program is generously supported by the Power Corporation of Canada.

2023-2024
Yutong Lin, MA, Montréal, Canada
In the form of collaborative bookmaking and publishing, the curatorial project Zomia Garden considers the legacy of botanical exploration during the 1920s–1940s as an entry point for approaching trans-Himalayan geography through the knowledge of plants, landscapes, and ways of habitation. This project will seek to initiate dialogues with emergent artists and writers from the region, prompting different practices of translations.

Co-finalists (mentorship phase):

Batoul Faour, MArch, Beirut, Lebanon
Glass Politics seeks to examine the following: how can a critical biography of glass allow for a different type of reading of a city as politically complex as Beirut? The project will expand the conversation on glass and violence beyond Beirut and across different conflict-prone geographies to construct a collective psychology of destruction around this material. The project will also explore broader themes of architecture’s vicinity to violence, the possibilities of reconstitution, and questions of self-preservation through it.

Anoushka Mariwala, MArch Graduate Student, New York, USA
Architectures of Rice hopes to examine how the agrarian is mapped, preserved, contested, and enacted in the context of rice production in India and Bangladesh to create an expanded understanding of the connection between resources and labour. The project hopes to create a toolkit to encourage the examination of food production systems globally.

2022-2023
Clarissa Lim Kye Lee, Cultural Worker, Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Making Mamak begins with two premises: First, art and cultural collectives operate within the precarity of capital-valued space. Second, through care and friendship, collectives rebuild found spaces for art and cultural production. Situated in Malaysia, this project solicits secrets from collective members by documenting the informal architectural adjustments they make, and subsequently creates a digital hacker kit for cultural workers everywhere to shape their spaces.

Co-finalists (mentorship phase):

Thuto Durkac-Somo, Writer, New York, United States
Personal Home Computing researches material and theoretical precedents for contemporary Smart Homes. The research traces the marketing promise of computers improving domestic labour simultaneous to innovations in tracking human data via motion sensors and digital cameras. This project addresses the dehumanizing effects of domestic tracking technology. The final format of this research proposes to produce a home-as-computer environment, making the hidden data operations visible.

Jola Idowu, Student/Designer, Chicago, United States
Contrary to Common Beliefs explores the potential of protest as a precedent for the architecture and design of the urban city. The research, sited in Chicago, investigates the participant strategies and tactics utilized during the George Floyd Protest, the first protest in Chicago since 1968 in which the national guard was involved. The project proposes a collaboration between activists and designers to create speculative prototypes for reorganizing and infiltrating the city that can generate covert and overt practices of civil disobedience.

2021-2022
Joyce Joumaa, Video Artist, Tripoli (Lebanon), Montréal (Canada)
In 1962, the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer was invited to conceive an international fairground in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, which was never completed. كیف لا نغرق في السراب / To Remain in the No Longer is a documentary film that employs archival materials, interviews, and research notes to look at how architecture operates in this failed state. By examining the precarity of the project site that remains to this day, the film also reflects on the country’s current socioeconomic crisis.

Co-finalists (mentorship phase):

Exutoire (Quy Son, Bui & Paul-Antoine, Lucas), Architects, Oslo, Norway
A Queer Practice of Architecture looks towards an architecture of otherness to investigate the act of queering architecture—a practice characterized by the challenging of norms and normativity. It seeks to deconstruct the profession’s established framework to create alternative futures in which self-expression and self-definition are inalienable. The project aims to frame queering space, a neither utopian nor abstract concept, as an active, tangible process—a way of seeing, thinking, and making architecture.

Samia Kayyali, Architect/Landscape Architect, Amman, Jordan
On Architecture and Abundance explores how representational tools in architecture are complicit in manufacturing a promise of abundance through the colonial logic of infinite expansion. Informed by writings and theory on representational tools, relational ethics, and the reflexive turn first mapped out in cultural anthropology, the project aims to collectively produce an online resource, designed as a studio syllabus plug-in, to confront the logic of these tools as they are currently taught and learned.

As of 2021 the Emerging Curator Residency Program replaces the Emerging Curator Program, which the CCA had offered since 2011.