North America has a Substituted History: we live on a continent where one set of histories and heritage was forcibly substituted for another. The main narrative that drives our culture-making is an import from somewhere else.
Since cultural literacy is one of the key values of this school, we should be leaders, not followers, in the diversity and inclusiveness of our curriculum. Here, Paniz Moayeri speaks about the struggle with her identity as a Muslim Persian, and the importance of seeing one’s cultural history reflected in architectural education.
This fall, Paniz Moayeri and Haneen Dalla-Ali created an installation to shed light on the experiences of newcomers to Canada. Bright Whispers is a forest of lanterns, each inscribed with a different story of immigration, written in the native language of the story teller. Samuel Ganton invites us to take a closer look at the installation, and reflects on the significance of these stories for Canada and for this moment in history.