UTS academics star at Venice Architecture Biennale

Southern Resilience

Penny Allan and Martin Bryant are producing a film, Southern Resilience, together with Sue Ann Ware (University of Newcastle), Katrina Simon (UNSW), and James Melsom (UTS). 

Landscape always has a compelling presence in southern lands. The big skies, the endless land, the broad seas, and the extreme climates… life and landscape are always inextricably connected. However, over the last 200 years, legacies of industrialised culture have left deep scars. In this film, we offer four video-snapshots on fire, water, humus and forest - the raw elements of our landscape - and describe how they were, how they are, and what we are doing with communities to renourish them. 

Indo-Pacific Air

Urtzi Grau and Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal have designed an installation for the central pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. 

Supported by grants from the Alastair Swayn Foundation and Acción Cultural Española, Folk Costumes, Indo-Pacific Air is an installation that constructs the pre-history of our current masked state. It replicates five atmospheric conditions found at the end of 2019 in the Indo-Pacific and collects the architectures they produced for the body, providing visitors with a glimpse of the region’s highly politicised air. If the five samples of the air we breathe form a map of the Indo-Pacific, the architectures - future folk costumes of a region in the making - show how, before our global pandemic, masks and respirators already defined the Indo-Pacific imaginary.