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Not an Expert: A discussion about Cultural Authority and collaboration

Not an Expert is video recorded online discussion about Cultural Authority and collaboration with Danièle Hromek and Francoise Lane, convened by Sarah Lynn Rees as part of the Asia Pacific Architecture Festival. The discussion focuses on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Authority in the built environment, acknowledging Indigenous and Western views are not aligned within the architectural process. It further discusses Cultural Authority in practice and within communities.

National Museum of the American Indian

The National Museum of the American Indian was established as part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, USA. The building serves as an educational space for Native Americans to gather, celebrate and share their culture. The design of the building is representative of Native American culture and was done in collaboration with Elders of North and South American tribes.

Names and Naming: Speaking Forms into Place (The Land is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia)

This chapter of The Land is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia, titled Names and Naming: Speaking Forms into Place, explores the neglect of using Aboriginal names of people and places. The paper focuses on the significance that Australian Indigenous people in general give to the meaning and use of proper names of people and places and how with some exceptions, this neglect continues today. It investigates this neglect through the reflection of the prevailing preoccupation of anthropologists and linguists with the semantico-referential meanings and functions of language rather than with the culturally shared notions and images all names evoke, provoke and embody.

Material specificity: A ‘radically conservative’ approach

As a transformative profession, architecture inevitably impacts the Country whose materials it consumes. By grounding design processes in Country and embracing the nuances of place, we can achieve fit-for-purpose built outcomes that could exist nowhere else, explains Michael McMahon.

Mapping Indigenous Futures: Decolonising Techno-Colonising Designs

The Mapping Indigenous Futures: Decolonising Techno-Colonising Designs provides a critical interrogation of the consequences of modernity and coloniality, particularly in an Aboriginal Australian context, with focus on the accelerating speed of socio-communicative technological change. The paper provides five provocations that illustrate ways in which the nature of modernity enables socio-communicative technologies to increasingly eliminate groups’ capacities to imagine decolonising being-human. It includes application of learnings surrounding decolonising design modes of listening and comprehending that can contribute to help groups think, talk and map their situatedness and mobilise decolonising options for their own worlds.

Lowitja Institute

The Lowitja Institute is Australia’s only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled health research institute. The built project was designed with the priority of connection to Country.

Lockhart River Retail Store and Offices

The Retail Store and Offices in Lockhart River is a built project in Far North Queensland. It serves as a commercial space to a remote Aboriginal community with facilities that meet their needs. The design of the space works with Country, taking into consideration the culture, climate and landscape of the area.

Living with Country

An ABC Radio conversation series in which Jonathan Green talks with First Nations spatial and cultural practitioners about their practices on Country.

Listen, observe, learn: Ethics and protocols on Country

In this discussion Dr Danièle Hromek explores the protocols and ethics she learnt from her family and from Country as a child. She explores how these ethics and protocols relate not only to Country but the built environment and why they are important for non-Indigenous people to learn.

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