MURRAY & MURRAY COMPETITION 2024
September 5 – September 12
Associate Professor Zachary Colbert, Ottawa 2120 1
When we look at the complicated legacies of policies, practices, and physical artifacts that attempt to demolish barriers and open the space of our cities in the burbs, we learned that they do not necessarily work the way they are supposed to not loophole a bond.
Interboro, The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion2
OPEN CITY
The title of this year’s Murray & Murray drawing competition is ‘Open City.’
Open City: these two words put together might evoke welcome and spatial breadth, conjuring up urban images devoid of barriers. But they may also be understood as a plea to literally open the city: to make it truly accessible, public, shared, and inclusive. In a war, Open City refers to a city declaring itself taken, the city becoming an “open city,”‘ abdicating to avoid further destruction. As a prefix qualifying the “city,” Open City also recalls other urban movements and their representations – Garden City, Ordinary City, Just City, Rebel City, Happy City, or the promised Smart City, one that itself brings forth other forms of connectedness and openness, namely, data-driven systems and responses that can be either open-source or proprietary. Open City might resides in the world of ideas: Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Virilio’s City of Panic, Branzi’s No-Stop City, or Ballard’s The Concentration City all bring forth crucial theories of collective human habitation. Open City may also conjure cities as a cherished topic of utopia which architects and urban thinkers have envisioned throughout history – critiquing, challenging, speculating, re-inventing, or exposing the cities’ foundations, systems, and networks – representations that open the city up to alternately challenge hierarchies and expose failures.
In other words:
Open City is open to interpretation.
Open City is yours to define.
Open City is an invitation, an open invitation to rethink the city, or to lay its realities “open” for all to see, as though you are performing upon it a vivisection that exposes its innerworking – with all its beauties and miseries.
Open City, this years’ Murray & Murray Drawing prompt, asks you to look at the city, a city, this city, or an imagined city—past or present. You may focus on any surface, corner, street, park, building, neighborhood, public, or protected space you wish, and … open it up to show us what you would like us to see.
Paper size: 18” x 24”
Medium: hand-drawn or hybrid (hand-drawn and digital) drawings (i.e. drawings must have a hand-drawn component).
Exhibition Include your name, year, and your student number on the back of the paper
Title You might consider giving your drawing a title and brief (one or two line) description.
Deadline: 11:00 am on Thursday, September 12th
11:00 a.m. to noon
12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
4:00pm
Phase 1 Judges: All Faculty and Staff (all faculty and staff to identify 10 strong drawings each)
Finalist drawings are identified and pinned up in the PIT (i.e. the drawings that received most votes in the first jury phase)
Phase 2 Judges: Menna Agha, Zach Colbert, Steve MacLeod, Tim Murray (to be confirmed), Honorata Pienkowska-Roseman, Faysal Tabbarah, and Sneha Sumanth.
Awards Announcements in the Pit
Murray & Murray Prizes3:
1st prize: $1,500;
2nd prize $1,000;
3rd prize $ 500;
+ 3 honours Awards $500
(allocations may change at the discretion of the phase 2 jury)
Potential openings and starting points…
Draw to notice, record, show, critique, track, or trace.
Draw to tell stories that must be told.
Draw to overlay multiple spaces and times, to superimpose scales.
Draw to grapple with uncertainties and shifts.
Draw to make visible those invisible flows and forces that impact our cities.
Over the next week, you are asked complete a drawing that engages with any dimension of Open City. Ultimately, you can choose to respond to this call in any way you wish. By way of example, you may consider one of the approaches below:
- Sensing and Reading – Being aware of your own positionality and what it means to represent others, you can foreground the experience of the textures and elements of the city, opening yourself and our eyes to the life that inhabits or maintains the city, to the lives that it might protect, neglect, or reject. Like Masao Okabe’s frottages, Interboro’s direct recordings, Michael Wesely or Forensic Architecture’s analyses over time, your drawing can focus on a street, event, or city area at one moment or over time to expose the experiences of the policies and infrastructures that they manifest.
- Fictions and Projections – You may consider your “Open City” submission as an opportunity to put forth grafted possibilities and imaginaries onto a city’s reality. This might learn from propositions that span Piranesi’s 1762 Campo Marzio map of an eternal yet fictional Rome to Archigrams’ propositions for Plug-in and Instant Cities, or the more recent speculations by Lateral Office for regionally-connected cities – opening up the city to different pasts, presents, or futures.
- Revealing and Critiquing – your drawing can work with layering, juxtapositions, collage, and assemblage that make visible some of the invisible social, cultural, and political forces that may be at play, or even propose how existing realities might be re-imagined (see for example the drawings of Feral Atlas, Clement Masurier, Katie Shima or Lalekan B. Jeyifous).