CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal

Floating Museum served as artistic directors of the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial, This is a Rehearsal, which invited audiences to consider cities as a continuous process rather than an enduring object. The catalogue for This is a Rehearsal documents and interprets the contributions of 80 local and global participants whose work challenged conventional understandings of how cities function, who plays a role in shaping them, and how proposed solutions might respond to the overlapping crises of contemporary life.

About CAB 5

This is a Rehearsal invites audiences to consider cities as a continuous process rather than an enduring object. This is a pronoun, adjective, and adverb; it points elsewhere. It refers to the myriad forms of art and design that evolve and emanate from the perpetual churn of the city: architectures, infrastructures, landscapes, monuments, technologies, criticisms, poetic forms, performances, spaces, theories, histories, and social organizations. In parallel, the word rehearsal offers an alternative to a manifesto. Rather than declare one particular aim, rehearsal is an open-ended framework that is intentionally designed to allow for uncertainty, progress, failure, and redemption. Rehearsals, like cities, coordinate a range of people coming together from different contexts, cultures, and lived experiences to produce environments in fulfillment of a range of perspectives. In this sense, rehearsals are structures of constant coordination and re-negotiation.

This also refers to CAB itself. A biennial is a form that organizes other forms. We do not see it as a stranger or outsider; we see it as an integral function of the city. It is in itself a process of production. Biennials are informed by the city and offer a range of potential forms to the city. While CAB is expressed as a range of exhibitions, installations, performances, and spectacles, we see This is a Rehearsal as a feedback loop and timing device. A biennial is not merely a conversation about cities but also a conversation of, and with, the city. It is also a reflection on a range of cities, as they are, as they were, and as they could be.