In the foreground: Patrick Brub, Back / Ground, 2025. To the right: ONOMIAU, Les huit collines, 2022-2025. Photo credit: Jean-Christophe LemayThe International Garden Festival is launching a call for proposals to select designers to create the new temporary gardens for the festivals 27th edition.Created by Marie-Jose Lacroix, Denis Lemieux, Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec, and Alexander Reford at the turn of the new millennium, the International Garden Festival is recognized as one of the most important contemporary garden festivals in North America.The upcoming edition of the festival, which is set to open on June 20, 2026, will take place on the site of Les Jardins de Mtis Reford Gardens and the theme will be Mapping Sensitivity.In the midst of the triennial thematic cycle, which began a year ago, the upcoming theme aims to pursue an ongoing reflection on the poetics of space and how we relate to our physical surroundings and the world. While last editions theme, Borders, focused on the challenges of organizing and representing geographical space and raising geopolitical concerns, the theme of the 27th edition takes the sensitive turn.Mapping Sensitivity draws its inspiration from sensitive mapping, which is distinguished by its consideration of the subjective and immaterial dimensions of a place. It traces the shared representations of a space that is described, lived, and felt, and considers the real experience that users have of a given space as well as the emotional relationship they develop with it.For the 27th edition, the International Garden Festival is inviting designers from all backgrounds to design a garden using a sensitive, fundamentally inclusive, and relational approach. At once real and fantasized, this garden will take on its full meaning thanks to the users who frequent it, shaping it in turn.This call for proposals is open to all landscape architects, architects, visual artists, and multidisciplinary teams from Canada and abroad, and the festival encourages participants to form multidisciplinary teams. Applicants are limited to one proposal, either as individuals or as a team. Participants can be from a single city or country or can cross international boundaries.Hermine Demal + Stephen Zimmerer, Peek-a-Boo (detail), 2025. Photo credit: Martin BondDesigners are invited to design a garden that can take place in one of the axes of the festival. The artistic and technical committees of the festival in collaboration with the designers,will identify the site that will best showcase their project. Designers will be asked to imagine their garden for exhibition for at least two summers, and to propose strategies for the repurposing or recycling of the garden or its materials after the end of its exhibition.The deadline to submit proposals electronically isMonday, October 27, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. EST. Applications submitted after the deadline will not be accepted.For more information or to submit a proposal, click here.The post 27th International Garden Festival issues call for proposals appeared first on Canadian Architect.