From Here, Convening Place

Studio North is a Calgary-based practice dedicated to the craft of building community. Their work includes an award-winning CNC-designed outdoor dining hall arch that is both modular and sits lightly on the landscape, a “dream/dive” platform that serves as an outdoor cabin on a riverbank, and a number of acclaimed laneway houses. Their public art installations include Parallax installed for Nuit Blanche Toronto and an installation in.side.out for Harbourfront Centre in Toronto that explores the openings and thresholds that frame perceptions of interior and exterior space. Studio North has been recognized as a young creative force by NYC Art Director’s Club, and an Emerging Designer Award by the Toronto-based Design Exchange.

Matthew Kennedy is a designer, artist and maker with a curiosity for materials and production process. Awarded the Rossetti Travel Fellowship in 2011, Matt researched compact housing typologies in Japan, and has received recognition for his thesis work focused on developing a strategy for laneway housing. 

Mark Erickson studied drawing and sculpture and has an affinity for learning through making with his hands. He has worked in London, UK, and Vancouver and has taught architectural technology at the University of The Gambia, Banjul, West Africa. Both have a Masters of Architecture from Dalhousie University in Halifax, where they met.

Cohabitation Strategies is a non-profit cooperative dedicated to the understanding of complex urban processes through action research as well as the creation of participatory frameworks assisting communities to envision and transform their own living environments. Co-founders Lucia Babina, Emiliano Gandolfi, Gabriela Rendón, and Miguel Robles-Durán have collaborated with governments, municipalities, art institutions, community groups and activists to facilitate transformative urban interventions and to bring about social and spatial change. In the past decade, the cooperative has produced work in cities across Europe and in North and South America. Recent projects have included Food Circle/Collective Kitchen in Arles, France, investigating food cycles and food accessibility; Playgrounds for Useful Knowledge, employing play and performance to regenerate just and sustainable forms of collective inhabiting in Philadelphia; Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, a project commissioned by MoMA in New York City addressing uneven development through the design of a new public housing program involving housing cooperatives and community land trusts; and Comfort Zones - Behind the Scenes, a year-long experimental research study of the university campus in Mississauga, Ontario. Leading the workshop are two founding members of Cohabitation Strategies, Lucia Babina and Gabriela Rendón. 

Lucia Babina is a cultural activist focused on sustainable ways of cohabitation and coexistence. Her aim is to reflect on the current global unevenness and injustice by means of collective and artistic process. She is a founding member of Cohabitation Strategies and co-founder of iStrike in Rotterdam, an environmental organization aimed at creating platforms of analysis, comparison, and international exchange. She is co-author of The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour as part of Stedelijk Goes West, (Amsterdam, 2009) and has been in residence at the Atelier LUMA in Arles. In Paris, she is collaborating with Morland Living Lab on new work in 2019.

Gabriela Rendón is an architect and urban planner committed to social and spatial justice. Her research interests include urban decline and restructuring of immigrant neighbourhoods, community planning and design, participatory action research, women-led urban community practices, solidarity urban economies, and housing cooperative models. She is a founding member of Cohabitation Strategies and an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Parsons School of Design / The New School in New York City. She has a PhD in Spatial Planning and Strategy and has taught graduate urban studies at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Tiffany Shaw is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and registered architect based in Alberta. She holds a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University, a Masters in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and is currently working at Reimagine Architects. Shaw has exhibited widely including the Architecture Venice Biennale, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Pier 21, Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. She has been the recipient of multiple public art commissions such as Edmonton's Indigenous Art Park, kinistinâw Park and Winnipeg’s Markham Bus Station. Among her public art projects, Tiffany has produced several notable transitory artworks and is a core member of Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.

Oscillating between digital and analogue methodologies Tiffany’s work gathers notions of craft, memory and atmosphere. Her practice is often guided by communal interventions as a way to engage a lifted understanding of place. While born in Calgary and raised in Edmonton, Tiffany’s Métis lineage derives from Fort McMurray via Fort McKay via the Red River.