Above ––
On The Annual cover image: The moon was installed at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in April 2016, alongside Gillian Dykeman’s video Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future, watercolour schematic drawings of the earthworks, and a keystone covered in tachyon particles. For more, please see Gillian Dykeman’s Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future (page 13-18) and Psychic Strata (page 19-26), both in The Annual (2017). Cover photograph taken by Jesse Boles, courtesy of Gillian Dykeman (2015).

The Annual 

Reconnaître, imaginer, la relation.
(Recognizing, imagining, Relation)
— Édouard Glissant[1]

At the end of every academic year, the Graduate Architecture, Landscape and Design Student Union (GALDSU) at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto issue an open call to graduate students to serve as editors for a yearly publication of student work.

In 2016, Dayne Roy-Caldwell, Elise Hunchuck, and Jasper Flores were appointed as co-editors for the fifteenth edition of The Annual.

On October 06, 2017, in conjunction with the opening of the new faculty building at 1 Spadina, The Annual was launched at the off-site concept space in Toronto, CA.

An excerpt from the editors note:

“Dear Reader,

On the evening of the 24th of December 1968 the first human-piloted mission to the moon entered lunar orbit. From their position, the astronauts on board Apollo 8 held a live broadcast, transmitting photographs of the Earth and its moon back to those transfixed on Earth. One of the photographs taken that night by NASA astronaut Williams Anders was Earthrise. The glowing blue earth appeared fragile in the expanse of an inky black universe, dwarfed by a looming lunar landscape in the foreground. For the first time in recorded human history, humanity, as such, was able to visually apprehend the finitude of its own habitat.

Shortly after the successful Apollo mission, Earthrise was used on the cover of The Whole Earth Catalog. Printed from 1968-1971, the catalog was the result of beat culture, student and anti-Vietnam protests (at Berkeley and throughout Europe), a burgeoning digital culture, and the environmental movement. A “field guide for the young and old to the archaeology of the contemporary,” [2] the catalog was a means by which to access tools of practice and thought, a place to learn skills and increasingly, a way for individuals to develop solutions to what they saw as a series of untenable political and ecological realities–not only in America, but throughout the world. In the years since, the consciousness of our habitat’s self-dependence has done little to stem the intensification of resource extraction, itself only amplified by the technical progression of our ability to extract those resources, driven by the ever-increasing competitive logic of capital.

Since we began work on this edition of The Annual in the summer of 2016, the urgency of our planetary concerns have only continued to intensify. Entangled within the undeniable realities of the Anthropocene and all of the ecological, political and economic foreclosures this may result in, we return to the earth, the site of our contemporary struggle, and look up, toward the lunar landscape of the present with Gillian Dykeman’s striking and richly layered Dispatches from the Future Feminist Utopia (cover, 13, 19). An installation of sculptures, watercolour schematic drawings and videos–and this year’s cover image, a photograph of her sculptural moon taken by Jesse Boles in an homage to The Whole Earth Catalog–Dykeman recasts major earthwork as abandoned alien technology, appropriated by feminists of the future in order to bring forth the feminist utopia. A polyvocal narrator comes to us in the form of a familiar moon, and, through multiple genders and accents, tells us how to–here, on Earth and in the present–activate these earthwork devices in order to bring about the feminist utopia now.

As co-editors, Dykeman’s work compelled us, in the words of Édouard Glissant, to “recognize, imagine, [and] relate” the multiplicity of ways in which the graduate students of Daniels confront the realities of our world and their worlds as a way to imagine and create space for multiple futures. And who better to look to than our own student body? We cross and, indeed, oftentimes blur, divisions of class, race, gender and sexuality, while simultaneously reinforcing aspects of these and other identities. How do our differences and similarities affect our relationships with and to each other? How do these differences and similarities affect how we design? How might the practices of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and visual studies suggest ways for us to design with and for each other? This is the provocation that we hope reverberates throughout this special edition of The Annual, and with each of you, wherever you may be.

Looking to avoid generalizations that come with categories of discipline, cohort and project type, we reviewed each submission, studying the ways
in which each might encounter or inform another in their respective social, political, and ecological contexts. Our method–if we may call it that–also implies that we began this process without a set view of what would emerge at the other end. In the end, we arrived at a total of 66 contributions (61 individual projects and 5 collective ones), across the range of disciplines provided at the Daniels faculty (44 architecture, 20 landscape architecture, and 2 visual studies)[3], divided equally between 33 men and 33 women. This transdisciplinary trail reveals a network of relationships between the methods of research, writing, design, field work, and curation that are utilised within and perform exchanges between the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and visual studies. It is a vast conceptual terrain, but one in which we hope you–like us–find many compelling and surprising perspectives.

[...]

We would like to thank everyone who has made The Annual possible. We are deeply grateful to each and every one of the students at Daniels who shared their research and designs and their words and their images with us. We must share a special thank you to Jeannie Kim for not only being a steadfast, long-term supporter of The Annual as an autonomous student publication, but also for her invaluable mentorship to multiple generations of editors. Thanks to this year’s copy-editors, Taylor Gould, Henry Heng Lu, Aaron Hernandez, and a very special thank you to copy-editor, proofreader, supporter and interlocutor Jocelyn Lambert Squires. This publication took its form due to our ongoing conversations and exchanges with each of the editor’s extraordinary networks of friends, colleagues, instructors, advisors and supporters, and to each of you, we will thank you privately (if we have not already, many times over). And last, of course, we thank all the members of GALDSU executive and general council for their continued support of this graduate student publication.

And so we end, as we began, without a set view of what might emerge in the future...with hope and a provocation to those that will come after us–not only to the next editors of The Annual, but to the current and future students of the Daniels faculty. We hope you enjoy this Annual as much as we enjoyed bringing these pages together, and that you too might find inspiration in the potency and scope of relational imaginaries we found. And if you, like us, believe that “imagination changes mentalities, however slowly it may go about this,” [4] then our “message will be one of hope.” (13)

Elise Hunchuck,
Jasper Flores,
& Dayne Roy-Caldwell

Berlin & Toronto March 2017”

The Annual is available for purchase in Toronto at SWIPE Books at 401 Richmond and may also be purchased directly by contacting GALDSU [at] daniels [dot] utoronto [dot] ca


Notes
[1] Please see ‘Generalization’ in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
[2] Whole Earth Field Guide, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016.
[3] The editors were disappointed they were unable to include the work of urban design students, however, the urban design program was represented through research and design proposals carried out under the supervision of an urban design studio.
[4] See Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, page 183.