Unsettling Educational Modernism

The iconic architecture of the brutalist modernist megastructure of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, built by architect Arthur Erickson in the 1960s is the site of the artistic research project into the history of this “radical campus” and its built environment by Vancouver and Vienna based artists Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber. The collaborative research group, “Guests & Hosts”, formed by Bitter & Weber and Métis scholar June Scudeler, including Métis scholar and student Treena Chambers, Kanien’kehá:ka Mohawk student Toni-Leah Yake, as well as Rachel Warwick and Hannah Campbell, has challenged the narrative of the radical campus, so called because it was informed by experimental concepts of learning and teaching. Using the spaces of a settler colonial institution, the project shifts perspectives by unsettling and challenging western-based concepts of pedagogy and knowledge. Combining archival photographic material, architectural photographs by the artists, and interventions into the institutional spaces by Guests & Hosts, the project performs the claim for places rather than spaces for Indigenous ways of knowing and learning.

Texts by Treena Chambers, June Scudeler with Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber.
The series Bildungsmoderne/Educational Modernism is published in cooperation with Edition Camera Austria, Graz.