‘A lot of pride and joy': the First Nations team representing Australia at the Venice Biennale of Architecture

The Guardian

10-05-2025

Australia's participation in next year's Venice Biennale remains under a cloud. With Creative Australia holding fast to its decision to cancel its commission of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino, it's becoming increasingly likely that the Australian Pavilion might remain dark in 2026.
It is an added weight for the First Nations team who have unveiled their new creation inside the pavilion as part of Venice's other biennale: the Venice Biennale of Architecture, held every other year in the Giardini.
The seven designers, collectively working under the moniker The Creative Sphere, are the first all Indigenous team Australia has sent to Venice. Tasked with introducing Indigenous concepts of building, design and connection to Country to the world, they have painstakingly reconstructed their rammed-earth, 4.8 metre by nine metre prototype called Home, first created at the University of Sydney.
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Hand-built from scratch from sustainable materials – clay, plaster and plywood – sourced from within the Veneto region, Home's construction relied on barges travelling up Venice's canals and off-loading at the base of the Australian pavilion's elevated site. From there, wheelbarrows and makeshift ramps were the only means of transporting the building materials inside.
Home's walls are made from 139 individually cast plaster panels, each of which required a minimum of five to six people to make.
'The oils of our skins are embedded throughout this entire exhibition,' says Worimi and Biripi Guri architect Jack Gillmer-Lilley, of SJB Architecture in Sydney and part of The Creative Sphere.
It is his hope that Home will encourage each visitor to the Australian Pavilion to embrace their unique relationship with the concept of home.
'For me, the definition keeps changing, it's not tangible,' he says. 'I never had a stable home growing up. There was lot of family trauma, there's a lot of stories of happiness, a lot of sadness and we were always moving around. Home for me is where I can feel connected with my family, regardless of where in the world I am at the time.'
For Quandamooka architect Bradley Kerr, home used to be 'where Mum is'; now the father-of-two defines home as wherever he can 'share in his son's smile and stupid fart jokes'.
'We didn't want to impose a feeling or an image or an idea on to people,' he adds. 'We wanted people to find something they relate to and connect to, because for us as First Nations people, it's one of the ways that we relate to and connect with each other, and it's something that we felt we really needed to share within this space.'
The Creative Sphere team were working when the news broke that Sabsabi and Dagostino had been sacked by Creative Australia, the producers of their biennale project (with the Australian Institute of Architects, which commissions them). The architects shared a statement in solidarity with the artist, writing on Instagram: 'As First Nations people, we respond to this act of censorship, exclusion and marginalisation with disappointment and concern.'
Although the project never started with it in mind, Home became the team's response to the defeat of the voice referendum in 2023.
'We're still trying to demonstrate that we want to move forward together, and that we want to celebrate and share our culture with Australian people,' says Kerr. 'We want to continue to be generous, in spite of all the backlash, the racism that we have to manage and juggle and face on a daily and weekly basis.
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'People want, and expect, marginalised people to feel all of that deep sadness and trauma. But our strength comes from joy, in spite of all of the challenges that we face. Joy in itself can be an act of resistance.'
Last year, a primary school in Sydney's Darlington took out the highest prize at the World Architectural festival in Singapore, praised for its celebration of the school's 'strong connections to Aboriginal people' and its incorporation of Indigenous art and design . The same architectural firm, FJC Studio, also designed the Yellamundie library in south-west Sydney, which was named one of the world's four most beautiful new libraries in September.
While only 0.3% of architecture students graduating from Australian universities identify as First Nations, multiple projects recently recognised by the AIA have incorporated connection to country at the centre of their design, including Spinifex Hill Project Space, Mildura's Powerhouse Place, Darwin's Nungalinya student accommodation project, and the North Head viewing platforms.
'We're getting stronger and stronger engagement with Indigenous place, country and the influence of Indigenous thinking around how buildings work … and how they actually speak to the significance of a place,' former AIA president Stuart Tanner told the Guardian in December.
'This is a whole other layer to architecture which is going to, I believe, elevate Australian architecture to a level far beyond what traditionally people might think architects do.'
When the Venice Biennale of Architecture concludes, Home will be manually dismantled, all its materials returned to the landscape they came from. No screws, adhesives or metal fixings were used in Home's construction.
'It was a tough build,' Gillmer-Lilley says. 'The amount of energy, the amount of emotions that were put in the creation of this … but it gives us a lot of pride and joy in the outcome.'