Toolkit for Today, CCA Montreal

Alena Beth Rieger was granted a residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture during the summer of 2024. During the residency, she engaged with the CCA's archival collection and took part in the PhD seminar, “Toolkit for Today.” Her research looked at demolition across the archive, including in photographs, books, drawings, legal documents, correspondence, films, audio recordings, and newspapers. She worked with the unique situation of CCA—a non-national institution with extensive holdings and searchable archival metadata at the object level. Archival structures tend to favour depth over breadth just as they often reinforce the study of individual authors and singular objects. While the well-known fonds of Cedric Price (who often engaged demolition as part of the design process) and Gordon Matta-Clark (who worked with demolition as part of his artistic practice) are central to the CCA collection, Rieger’s research expanded beyond these two canonical authors. The caveat “(now demolished)” completes the titles of at least 151 objects in the collection. This information, likely added in the interest of clarity, now serves to connect dissonant objects through their common trait of disappearance.