Bayaba Ba Nya: Performing Culture

Staging critical spatial acts of political resistance with Amiera Piscopo. Hosted by Bangawarra.

Culture is not static. It is performed, enacted, and made visible through the bodies, voices, and creative practices of those who carry it. In a world that continues to marginalise First Nations ways of knowing and being, the act of performing culture is itself an act of resistance.

Join us at PACT Theatre for the next instalment of Bangawarra Conversations, Bayaba Ba Nya, a bimonthly gathering that brings together emerging and established creatives to share ideas around decolonising creative spaces, practices, and industries. We explore how culture is enacted, embodied, and made visible through creative practice.

This edition is Rematriation of Housing.

Housing holds more than shelter. It holds inheritance, memory, and the quiet architecture of who a place was built to hold, and who it wasn’t. To examine how patriarchal systems shape housing is to ask who gets to build, who gets to keep, and whose knowledge shapes the record we’re left with. We look at how inequity creates specific vulnerabilities to homelessness. Family and domestic violence, structural wage and superannuation inequities, and gendered caregiving responsibilities, have long shaped who ends up without a place to call home. This is often framed as a women's issue, but trans, non-binary, and gender-queer people also face these same structural failures, and are often left out of the conversation.

Through conversation and collective making, we will explore how an archive of these gendered housing typologies can be built. This includes not only official records but also the stories, textures, and everyday knowledge of domestic violence shelters, transitional homes, and supportive living arrangements that often don’t make it into the formal archive to begin with. Our aim is to centre the experiences of trans, non-binary, and other marginalised people alongside cisgender women, recognising that the impacts of patriarchal structures extend broadly across those identities.

Whether you are an artist, architect, researcher, community member, or simply curious, this is an invitation to help shape a living record of what housing has meant (and could mean) for those navigating the intersections of gender, care, and economic justice across time.

Amiera Piscopo

Amiera is a graduate architect at Carter Williamson Architects, a casual academic at UTS (occasionally) and a tour guide with She Shapes History. She began research with an interest in older women’s housing, and the forms this can take. But this interest has led her to wanting to explore and understand an overarching question; ‘What does the term ‘women’s housing’ actually mean?’. Amiera is working towards building an archive of typologies of ‘women’s housing’ that demonstrate what this term has meant across histories and cultures, and is being built through collecting stories and a re-reading of existing archives.

Bangawarra

Bangawarra is a unique partnership of two interdisciplinary creative practitioners who centre transformative strategic, spatial and cultural approaches to Country while celebrating Ancestral stories, knowledges, language and culture. Co-founders and Directors, Dr Shannon Foster and Jo Paterson Kinniburgh, focus on developing meaningful and enduring connections to Country by embedding Aboriginal knowledges into landscape, architecture, built environment, public art, performance and master planning projects. Shannon is a D'harawal eora Knowledge Keeper and Traditional Custodian of the now-Sydney region while Jo is the former Director of Education for Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Architecture at UTS. For the past ten years, the team at Bangawarra have been driven by a shared praxes that revolves around the central belief that when we acknowledge overlooked spatial histories of place and Country, only then can we speculate on more inclusive, culturally rich and sustainable future spaces and places.

Something to bring along

We invite you to bring something to imprint into a paving stone. We will be creating tiles and pavers for a garden space at a Women and Children's Shelter in Sydney. We would love you to bring an object with an interesting texture or form, an item with meaning to you or a story attached to it.

Information from Venue

PACT is an accessible venue, with level access throughout the public areas of the building and non-gendered, ambulant and wheelchair accessible toilets.

There is accessible (non-dedicated) street parking on Railway Parade. The nearest accessible train stations are Erskineville (5 minutes) and Newtown (15 minutes).

Getting to PACT

By train: Erskineville Station (250m), Newtown Station (900m), and Macdonaldtown Station (1km)

By bus: 355 Bus Stop (250m); Newtown (900m)

By taxi: Erskineville Road Taxi Stand (300m)

By car: Railway Parade has unlimited free street parking

Contact the host of Bayaba ba nya: Staging critical spatial acts of political resistance

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