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By Lisa Ciota, Education Guide

“Chicago is part of the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi nations. Many other tribes—such as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sac, and Fox—also called this area home. Located at the intersection of several great waterways, the land naturally became a site of travel and healing for many tribes. Today, Chicago is still a place that calls people from diverse backgrounds to live and gather …”

So begins the Land Acknowledgement (see full statement here) which is prominently displayed in the entrances to the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. It also marks the starting point for student tours led by the CAC’s education guides. In these first few sentences, key themes that echo throughout our tour emerge:

• A sense of the place of Chicago and the symbolic meaning of fire
• Our City’s legacy of diversity – seven Native American tribes called Chicago home! – and our stories
• The interplay (or intersection) of water and land, and of people and memory

The CAC is the exclusive educational partner for the Chicago Architectural Biennial, which runs from September 19, 2019 through January 5, 2020. Over an 11-week period ending in late December, the CAC expects to conduct more than 70 field trips and reach approximately 3,000 students and chaperones.

Our student tour visits 10 of the 80 Biennial installations, prioritizing the interplay of people and place. Each stop, in its own way, has more than one story to tell, apropos of the Biennial’s theme “… and other such stories.” As such, the Biennial tour is more like a guided discussion led by an education guide. And while every student group visits the same exhibits, what each student takes away can be different based on their individual background and perspective as well as interactions with fellow students and guides.

A few key stops on the tour tend to reverberate with students more than others. Naturally, the sheer gorgeousness of Preston Bradley Hall, with its Tiffany glass dome and mosaics, is one of them. This space helps tell many stories including the building’s initial life as a free, public library open to all; the diversity implied by the inscriptions about learning and knowledge in 10 different languages; and the preservation and repurposing of the library into the Cultural Center.

These ideas of libraries, learning and preservation are later echoed in our stops at Adrian Blackwell’s Anarchitectural Library, Vivian Sansour’s seed library in the Marj and Prairie: Eating Our Histories exhibit and the library in Oscar Tuazon’s Great Lakes Water School. While at the Sweet Water Foundation’s Re-Root + Redux exhibit we talk about worker’s cottages, the everyday stories they represent and how we decide what is worth preserving. At this stop, we also delve into the symbolism of the Chicago flag and discuss if a fifth star were added, what should it represent?

Another memorable stop is Santiago X’s Hayo-Tikba (The Fire Inside) exhibit featuring a grass hut with video projection of fire on the outside and video abstraction of indigenous music and dance on the inside. Here we discuss the destructive and regenerative power of fire and the intimate connection to nature this type of housing fosters in a community. This awareness of our relationship with nature are further honored and reinforced in the aforementioned seed library and Great Lakes Water School exhibits.

The impact of stories is most evident in Mass Design Group’s, The Gun Violence Memorial Project. In a village of glass houses filled with personal mementos of victims of gun violence, we discuss how we remember people, places and events (both individually and collectively), the purpose of memorials and how our lives or communities are built, brick-by-brick, on individual stories. Akinbode Akinbiyi’s Easy Like Sunday Morning exhibit captures a similar idea in a series of 16 photographs of North Lawndale and 16 photographs from throughout the city displayed side by side. These photos remind of the individual places, spaces and moments that comprise our lives, communities and cities.

This year’s Chicago Architectural Biennial really forces visitors to reflect on our perceptions of place, so to conclude each tour we visit the Construct Lab’s How Together space to enable students to think and talk about their experience before returning to their school.

HEY EDUCATION GUIDES: There are so many ways we can tell the Biennial story, please share yours by commenting below.

For more information on the Chicago Architectural Biennial, visit the event website, or read the Chicago Tribune, Curbed Chicago or Common Edge reviews.