Fadi Masoud is a landscape architect and planner who focuses on the relationships between large-scale environmental systems, dynamic design, and the instrumentality of planning policies. Adrian Blackwell is an artist, designer, and theorist interested in the relationship between political economy and the production of physical spaces. In the context of Luis Jacob’s two-part installation, The View from Here, and within Blackwell’s structure Isonomia in Toronto? (harbour), Masoud and Blackwell discuss Toronto’s waterfront, drawing attention to the vulnerabilities of urban districts built upon reclaimed land, and the strategies available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Participants join in a mapping exercise, tracing the human and non-human actors transforming the shoreline, and through this activity, encourage a literacy of the interaction between the natural and operational forces creating urban space.
Adopting maps, printed street-views, books, and the city’s landscape, artist Luis Jacob’s installation explores many of Toronto’s conflicting narratives. As a central dynamic of the project, situated at Union Station and 259 Lake Shore Blvd E, Jacob has invited a series of guest artists, researchers, and thinkers who, from their own research and practices, extend the context of his presented materials. From mapping forms of social storytelling, to understanding cultural belongings as repositories of relations, and working with printed matter as sites of neighbourhood organizing—each offering reveals another View from Here.
Image Credit: Fadi Masoud, Terra-Sorta-Firma: Toronto’s expanding shoreline 1860-2017. Courtesy of the artist.
Bios
Adrian Blackwell (born and lives in Toronto, Canada) is a settler artist, urban designer, theorist and educator. Adrian’s practice focuses on the relation between physical spaces and political, economic forces. His work has been featured in exhibitions such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019); the Chengdu Biennale (2011); and the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (2005). Adrian is associate professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo and co-editor of the 2021 issue of Scapegoat: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy titled “c\a\n\a\d\a: delineating nation state capitalism.”
Learn more about Adrian Blackwell’s practice by listening to the Toronto Biennial of Art Podcast “Short Format” – season 1, episode 5 – available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Fadi Masoud is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Toronto and the Director of the Centre for Landscape Research Platform for Resilient Urbanism. He previously taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is an affiliated faculty at the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, where he co-leads research and designed projects on coastal urbanism, urban codes, and the Future of Suburbia. His research, writing, design work, and teaching focuses on establishing multi-scalar and emergent relationships between landscape and planning principles, tools, and practices.