Lola Sheppard (Canadian, b.1972) and Mason White (Canadian, b.1973) of Lateral Office (Canada, est.2004) with Leena Cho (American, b.1982) and Matthew Jull (Canadian, b.1970) of Arctic Design Group (USA, est.2012)
Lateral Office and Arctic Design Group
Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories
Album
Description
Claimed by the eight Arctic nations—Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States— while also being the native territory to numerous Indigenous peoples, the Arctic is a complex, contested space in the twenty-first century. Territorial claims, resource extraction, climate change, and ongoing colonialism reflect the range of ways in which inhabitation has been imposed and negotiated in the last hundred years. Simultaneously, emplaced stories of daily life of inhabitants who call the Arctic home further reflect a richly heterogeneous, cultural landscape at the forefront of accelerated transformations. Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories represents key narratives of inhabitation from each Arctic nation that reveals deep connections from the domestic interior to the landscape territory. The installation situates domestic life entangled with broader sociocultural, economic, and geopolitical forces, and it is conceived as “extracted core samples” capturing place-specific, domestic-territorial linkages that are also emblematic of collective matters of concern in the Arctic.
WITH THE ADDITIONAL SUPPORT OF
University of Toronto
Daniels Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Design
University of Waterloo, Social Science and Humanities Research
Council of Canada
University of Virginia School of Architecture, Jefferson Trust, Anchorage Museum
Production credits
Lateral Office + Arctic Design Group: Anthony Averbeck, Leena Cho, Benjamin DiNapoli, Vincent Chuang, Cam Fullmer, Matthew Jull, Jane Lee, Tyler Mauri, Julia Nakanishi, Kearon Roy Taylor, Lola Sheppard, Zihao Wei, Mason White
