The Creative Directors of the Australia Pavilion will present the vision of HOME for the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Led by Dr Michael Mossman, Emily McDaniel, and Jack Gillmer-Lilley, alongside a Creative Sphere of First Nations architects and practitioners, this year’s Australian pavilion explores the question of “what does home mean to you?” through interactions with memory, sensation, relationships, and future.
Blending the overall Biennale theme of Intelligens, Natural, Artificial, Collective, the Creative Sphere prioritises Australian Indigenous concepts of dialogue, yarning and preservation as mediators of cultures and community practices. Through the lens of Country, this is the first time at the Venice Architecture Biennale that the Australia Pavilion is an all First Nations design team, demonstrating the cultural and philosophical perspectives that have enabled the world’s oldest living cultures to survive and thrive. The exhibition will transform the Australia Pavilion into a Home—a place for cultural exchange, where visitors engage with the narratives of Country and their own concepts of Home.
This is a presentation that invites you to connect with the visceral qualities of Home.
This talk will follow a workshop with AA students involving hands-on casting of plaster panels that will then activate mark making through guest participation. The processes will facilitate relationships with each other, and stories that interact with on one’s own cultures, Australian Indigenous contexts of Country and the built environment to promote multi-dimensional knowledge sharing, care, and ways of working together.
DR MICHAEL MOSSMAN is a Kuku Yalanji man who lectures and researches at the University of Sydney School of Architecture Design and Planning. He is an architect who champions Country and First Nations cultures as agents for structural change in the broader architectural profession at educational, practice and policy levels.
EMILY MCDANIEL is a Wiradjuri woman from the Kalari (Lachlan River) and a Professor of Practice in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her curatorial practice employs Country-centred methodologies and actively engages with truth-telling and storytelling, in collaboration with First Nations communities, creative practitioners, architects, and designers.
JACK GILLMER-LILLEY is a Worimi & Biripi Guri and associate and First Nations lead at SJB Architecture, Sydney. Interested in the intersection of cultural knowledge systems and the built environment, he seeks to enable Country as co-designer and collaborator of narrative and architectural approach to place.
