Shanghai, Bangkok, Venice, Humlebæk, Paris, Basel, Vienna, Barcelona, Geneva, São Paulo, and elsewhere near you
"I’ve noticed many architects are trying to establish new conditions for their work. They insert themselves in the forces they research, alongside communities (not clients); they advocate for policies that precede any design brief. I have joined them—with a camera crew—as they seek another way architecture might actually act within fragile ecologies, natural and human-made.
Often I bring things I find when I’m filming back inside my building. I assemble objects, and not just images, on location. And I produce the movies for display in my galleries, in Montréal.
Yet films are portable. I notice this more than ever. We are all watching the same thing at the same time. Along those lines—and I am nowhere near the first to make this point—I also like how collective films are. Books circulate. But I can show the same film, or series of films, to a group wherever I choose and prompt a localized discussion, one that could not exist elsewhere or at another moment."
These reflections stem from I’ve Been Out on Location, a chapter in The Museum Is Not Enough 10–14, a book we've recently co-published with Lenz, exploring film as a curatorial research tool. Groundwork, our latest three-part film and exhibition series, extends this inquiry. The trilogy explores the conceptual development and field research of contemporary architects cultivating alternative modes of engagement with new project sites. In using documentary as a curatorial tool, we take a critical look at how designers across diverse geographies and contexts engage with their environments in preliminary phases of projects. In doing so, thinking processes, research, and stages of transformation will be highlighted as revelatory aspects of architectural work that help to deepen our understanding of new critical modes of practice and engagement. In light of the ecological crisis, the project questions how different architects situate themselves in relation to changing natural and disciplinary boundaries.
The first chapter, Into the Island, follows Xu Tiantian to Meizhou Island off the coast of China where she is creating a set of interventions to mediate between pressures of heritage and tourism with marine ecology. A second chapter, To Build Law, focuses on the work of bplus.xyz (b+) based in Berlin, and station.plus (s+), the chair for architecture and storytelling at ETH Zurich, as they organize a European Citizens’ Initiative to shift culture and legislation toward preservation and rehabilitation of the existing building stock. Finally, With An Acre closes the series by following Carla Juaçaba to the heart of Minas Gerais, Brazil where she is developing pavilions in a coffee field—minimal support structures in a territory with collectives resisting extractive industrial agriculture.
Conceived by Francesco Garutti and Irene Chin, together with film director Joshua Frank, and produced by the CCA, Groundwork launched in Montreal as a three-part exhibition and film series, that now travels to partnering institutions and film festivals worldwide. Here are some of the current and upcoming screenings, exhibitions, and conversations around the trilogy:
–Into the Island screens at the 15th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, through March 31;
–Groundwork trilogy screening and conversation with Irene Chin at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, May 6;
–To Build Law screening and exhibition, Galerie Callot - École d'architecture Paris-Malaquais, March 26 through April 30;
–To Build Law screening, Scuola Piccola Zattere, in Venice, March 11;
–To Build Law screens on Tënk, April 10 through July 10;
–Groundwork exhibition and film series, Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel, May 9 through August 30;
–To Build Law screening, World Congress of Architects, UIA 2026 in Barcelona, June 18 through July 2;
–With an Acre screens at the Architekturzentrum Vienna, as part of the Architektur.Film.Sommer 2026, this summer;
–Groundwork trilogy screening and conversation with Francesco Garutti, Bangkok Kunsthalle, this fall;
–Groundwork trilogy screening, Escola da Cidade, São Paulo, this fall;
–Groundwork exhibition and film series, Pavilion Sicli, Geneva, in spring 2027.
Our curiosity about the potential of film as a research and curatorial format—as a tool that can complement, but also transform, the way we conceive exhibitions and publications—began with Misleading Innocence (tracing what a bridge can do). Conceived by Francesco Garutti and directed by Shahab Mihandoust in 2014, the film brought together a multiplicity of voices to debate the thinking behind Robert Moses’s planning of the parkways of Long Island. The films we have produced since then exist on their own—as the single format of a project—or as part of a larger curatorial project that also takes the form of an exhibition. It’s through these films that we are able to amplify our inquiry into the forces shaping the built environment and the role of architecture in shaping society in turn, like with Now, Please Think About Yesterday (2019), What It Takes to Make a Home (2019), When We Live Alone (2020), To Remain in the No Longer (2023), or Where We Grow Older (2023).
For more about our curatorial, publications, research, film, exhibition and public programs, or opportunities to join us, visit our website. To keep in touch, subscribe here.
