Symposium: Echoes of Empire

Event Description

This symposium brings together a diverse range of voices around themes of colonialism and extraction as part of an ongoing collaboration between UTS Landscape and the Harvard Graduate School of Design Landscape Program. The event coincides with a travelling studio from the Harvard GSD and conjoint visit by the ten 2025 Loeb Fellows. The symposium will provide a forum for discussions around the impacts of relentless pursuit of economic growth that has propelled an ever-expanding demand for the extraction of natural resources, erasing, shaping, and altering cultures while transforming landscapes. Through the pursuit of power over resources, environments, and people, zones of rich cultural and bio-diversity have been devastated, communities displaced, and profound racial, social, and economic disparities have emerged. These are issues inherently intertwined with environmental changes that produce a ‘climate colonialism’. Extractive practices have caused ecological damage, perpetuated systemic inequalities, and power imbalances that disproportionately affect marginalised communities that generates perpetual zones of sacrificed landscapes. The symposium will draw together critical voices across art, design, science and culture to explore alternative narratives, institutional regimes, and new legacies that might structure different perceptions and values attributed to land and its non-human counterparts.

This event is organised through UTS Landscape Architecture and is part of UTS School of Architecture’s Solidarity public program.

Chair: Rosalea Monacella, Andrew Toland (UTS) and John Peterson

Panellists:

Tira Foran, CSIRO

Bianca Hester, UNSW

Janet Laurence, artist

Shana Griffin, Loeb Fellow

Matt Smith, Loeb Fellow

Sahar Qawasmi, Loeb fellow

Sam Spurr, University of Newcastle

Jessica Weir, Western Sydney University

Biographies:

Tira Foran is a senior research scientist based at CSIRO, the Australian research institute since 2010. He is a human geographer who has focussed on governance of energy and water resources, with a focus on public participation in planning. He’s had the privilege of working in places like Nepal and Myanmar; he did his PhD on hydropower and conflict in Thailand. Tira is currently working on transitions in Australian mining regions, as coal mines close, and as extraction of critical minerals intensifies.

Bianca Hester is an artist, writer and educator living and working on Dharawal land. Her work investigates entanglement between environmental crisis, colonial inheritance, extraction and extinction evident within specific locations across the Australian continent. Employing relational processes, she combines situated fieldwork, writing, sculptural production and performed actions to develop multi-layered projects that unpack diverse sedimentations registered in place. This approach generates an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of participants to activate aesthetic encounters that engage the present –and future – otherwise. She has exhibited widely within Australia and internationally. Recent works include Metabolic Scales, ‘These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature’ at UQ Art Museum (2025), Lithic Bodies, UNSW Galleries and The Clifton School of Arts (2024), Deep time coastline public walking series, throughout the Illawarra (2024), Dust of these domains, ‘Siteworks’, Bundanon (2023) and Reading Walking Lithic Bodies, Museum of Contemporary Art (2022). Her written works include Sandstone, Lost Rocks, A Published Event (2020) and Groundwork, Perimeter Editions #69 (2021). She is a continuing member of the collaborative trio Open Spatial Workshop (2003-ongoing), a founding member of CLUBSproject inc (2002-2007) and a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow (2016). Her project A world, fully accessible by no living being (2011) won the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art & Design, UNSW Sydney. www.biancahester.com

Janet Laurence is a well-known Australian artist, based in Sydney, whose work encompasses installation, photography, sculpture and video, often involving collaborations with architects, landscape architects and environmental scientists. Her work occupies the liminal zones or meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory. Profoundly aware of the interconnection of all life forms, Laurence often produces work in response to specific sites or environments using a diverse range of materials. Alchemical transformation, history and perception are underlying themes in her exhibition work.

Matt Smith is committed to rural community development and identifying how planning, design, and construction processes can positively impact small communities. To further this work, he partnered with other rural practitioners to launch Building Common Ground, an infrastructure accelerator that aims to provide long term support to rural, remote, and Indigenous communities and their leaders. Matt is also a visiting scholar at his alma mater, Montana State University, where he teaches and researches hybrid organizations as alternative models of design practice. Prior to his current work, Matt was managing director at MASS Design Group where he oversaw global operations from 2015 to 2023, supporting MASS’s ten-fold growth in staff and revenue while ensuring the organization remained mission focused. In 2019, he co-led the opening of MASS’s rural and Native-focused Santa Fe Studio.

Rosalea Monacella is s a registered Landscape Architect and has undertaken research on a number of cities around the world, generated urban masterplans for cities in China, USA, South America, Europe and Australia that explore design at the nexus of the urban and natural environments, and has been the recipient of a number of national and international awards and grants related to her practice based research as co-founder of the OUTR Research Lab at RMIT University Melbourne, Australia.

Shana M Griffin’s practice is interdisciplinary, research based, and decolonial—attending to the particular experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive regulation, economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and climate change. Her work exists across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, and land use planning and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender based violence. She is the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist initiative integrating critical research methods with activism and socially engaged art, and creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia public history project tracing the geographies of Black displacement, dislocation, and containment in New Orleans and the surrounding region. She also founded Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans. Her project SOIL interrogates the carceral spaces of what is left behind in and on the grounds of former and current sugarcane plantations along the Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana. Shana has received several awards, including a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow and 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. She holds a master of arts in sociology, a bachelor of arts in history, and a bachelor of arts in sociology.

Sahar Qawasmi is a 2025 Loeb Fellow and an architect, restorer, cultural organizer, and forager, committed to the conservation of land, restoration of architectural heritage, and preservation of Palestine’s cultural histories as testaments of creative collective resilience. ahar cofounded Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture with Nida Sinnokrot; it’s a progressive academy located on a hillside of deep architectural and natural histories in Ein Qiniya, Ramallah, Palestine, where artists, farmers, activists, and students rethink political and social agency and the space of the commons. There, through collective unlearning and experimentation, Sahar explores architectural and cultural practices outside of capitalist, national, and institutional structures to reimagine collective liberation.

John Peterson, architect, educator and activist, is Curator of the Loeb Fellowship. Peterson is the founder of Public Architecture, a national nonprofit organization based in San Francisco. The organization’s work has been showcased at the Venice Architecture Biennale, MoMA, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Benaki Museum in Athens, and the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. Public Architecture’s 1+ program challenges architecture and design firms to pledge a minimum of 1% of their time in pro bono services to nonprofits in need and has attracted participation from over 1500 firms nationwide. Public Architecture’s projects have been covered by national and international media; its ScrapHouse, a house built from only salvaged materials, was the subject of a National Geographic Channel documentary. The organization was a Harvard Business School case study in 2010 and has been supported by a long list of major funders.

Dr Sam Spurr is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle and a recipient inaugural Planetary Transitions Artist Residency at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany. Her current research on Mining Ideology and Coal Capitalism, examines the agency of architecture to make legible the complex forces at play in the age of the Anthropocene. Through this research Sam is exploring feminist theories of care and collective political subjectivity, ecological systems and indigenous cosmologies in the Australian context of Country.

Jessica Weir is an Associate Professor at Western Sydney University and non-Indigenous scholar who investigates environmental issues and natural hazard risk through a lens that holds environment and society in intimate relation. Her scholarship re-thinks nature and what counts as evidence about nature, innovating in areas traditionally investigated by the natural sciences. She also investigates the policy and regulatory consequences of co-located Indigenous and non-Indigenous jurisdictions. This research program is fundamentally informed by over two decades of collaboration with Indigenous leaders in Australia. Jessica’s internationally recognised book, Murray River Country (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2009), examines how an alliance of Indigenous leaders critique the public sector’s either/or hyper-separation of nature and society, to counter argue both/and. As an engaged academic, Jessica builds on 20 years in the public, private and community sector, including ten years with the Native Title Research Unit at the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).