Appel à projets 2027 – Festival international de jardins (Canada)

Landscape architects, architects, artists and multidisciplinary teams from around the world are invited to propose the gardens that will shape the 28th edition of the International Garden Festival.

International Garden Festival

Since 2000, the International Garden Festival has transformed the Jardins de Métis each summer into a laboratory for landscape experimentation. For its 28th edition, it invites landscape architects, architects, artists and multidisciplinary teams from around the world to design five new gardens. The next edition will open on Saturday, 19 June 2027 at the Jardins de Métis, in Québec’s Gaspésie tourism region.

The International Garden Festival is the largest contemporary garden festival in North America and one of the leading international platforms for creation and dissemination in architectural research.

The Festival takes place on a site adjacent to the historic gardens, establishing a dialogue between history and modernity, conservation, tradition and innovation. Each year, the event presents around thirty installations created by some 70 architects, landscape architects and designers from a range of disciplines.

Over the years, the International Garden Festival has presented work by some of the most influential designers of their generation, including Agence Spatiale, Appareil Architecture, Aranda\Lasch, Atelier Le Balto, Diana Balmori, Pierre Bélanger, BGL, Adrian Blackwell and Jane Hutton, Christopher Bradley-Hole, CCxA, Claude Cormier, Coryn Kempster and Julia Jamrozik, Bernard Lassus, NIPPAYSAGE, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Ken Smith, Snøhetta, Stoss Landscape Urbanism, Studio Bryan Hanes – DIGSAU, Taylor Cullity Lethlean, Pierre Thibault, Topotek 1, Charles Waldheim, and Mason White and Lola Sheppard.

The Festival is presented with financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, with the support of a community of donors and friends of the Festival.

2027 theme – Making visible: Alternative geographies

2027 will mark the conclusion of the Festival’s three-year thematic cycle, conceived by artistic director Ève De Garie-Lamanque and dedicated to our relationship with space and territory.

In 2025, Frontiers focused on questions surrounding the representation, organisation and management of geographical space, immediately raising issues related to geopolitics and private property. In 2026, Mapping the Sensible explored the intangible and affective dimensions of place, fostering relational dynamics and placing users at the centre of the discussion.

Under the theme Making Visible: Alternative Geographies, this new call will select four or five contemporary garden projects that continue the reflection initiated during the previous editions while bringing its blind spots to the fore.

Emerging at the intersection of Frontiers and Mapping the Sensible, this new theme questions the mechanisms, approaches and systems established as norms. In doing so, it draws in particular on the concepts of intersectionality—a theoretical framework introduced in 1989 by American legal scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw—and counter-mapping, a term coined in 1995 by American sociologist Nancy Lee Peluso. Among other aims, these concepts seek to give a voice and visibility to marginalised or traditionally under-represented individuals and communities.

To ensure that the selected projects complement those from the first two years of the thematic cycle, both conceptually and formally, designers are encouraged to consult the webpages and press releases for the 26th edition and 27th edition of the Festival.

Eligibility

• This call is open to landscape architects, architects, visual artists and multidisciplinary teams from Canada and abroad. The Festival encourages the formation of teams bringing together different disciplines. 
• Applicants may submit only one proposal, either individually or as part of a team. Participants may be based in the same city or country, or in different parts of the world.
• Applicants are invited to design a garden that can be located within any of the Festival’s areas. 
• Once the projects have been selected, the Festival’s artistic and technical committees will work with the designers to determine the site best suited to showcasing each project.
• The garden must be designed to remain on display for at least two summers, and strategies must be proposed for repurposing, reusing or recycling its materials at the end of its presentation period.
• Selected projects will receive artistic and technical support, as well as a production budget.

Timeline

The deadline for submitting an online application is Tuesday, 27 October 2026 at 5 pm EDT (UTC−4). Applications received after this deadline will not be considered.

The selected projects will be announced publicly in February 2027.

Full details are available on the International Garden Festival project platform.