Kandis Friesen works with dispersed and disintegrating monumental forms. Her compositions build from displaced histories, materials, structures, and sites, using assemblage and collage. This work is a constant translation and transposition, where language and image shift registers, trip alphabets, and slip surfaces and terrains. The echo and the choir develop as central modes, amplifying both the signal and source, the role of architecture and sound, in collective and individual forms of publication. Friesen’s research approaches architecture through intimate interiors and public constructions, inhabitations and evictions. Her work with sound is grounded in musical transmission, silence and mutedness, using bodies and buildings as instruments. Oral language becomes a portable homeland, an aural territory that is sounded, felt, and heard.

Her recent work responds to a series of architectures that could be considered hesitant monuments, proposing grafted frameworks for structural resonance, repositioning, and monumental dis/repair.