Past to Present
From Object to Icon: Art and Identity in Samoa
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anne E. Guernsey Allen
On January 1, 1962, Western Samoa became the first Pacific Island country to gain independence. In an increasingly globalized world, Samoan families, communities, and as a country turned to art and architecture that spoke to indigenous traditions while also communicating a newly emerging identity as a modern nation-state. Although contact with Western powers had been part of the Samoan experience for almost 150 years, the achievement of independence can be seen as a pivotal moment in this evolution. Often the results were hybrdic forms or substitutes that retained some aspect of the original art. The transformation of indigenous architectural styles and siapo (tapa, bark cloth) from cultural objects to semiotic icons is evident in 21st century Samoa at several layers of society. This paper focuses on how the arts functioned as markers of identity within villages in pre and early colonial times and their transformation to icons of national identity post-independence.
Amplifying Refugee Voices: Art, Memory, and Collective Interventionist Archiving
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathy Carbone
Art is a powerful medium for telling, sharing, and remembering stories. Since the onset of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, an increasing number of artists have been telling stories about why people are forced to flee and what home, displacement, and refugeehood look like to them—challenging the erasure of these stories from collective memory and highlighting the complex factors driving contemporary migrations. This paper examines a collaboration among an international group of artists, curators, activists, and an archivist to develop The Amplification Project: Digital Archive for Forced Migration, Contemporary Art, and Action. This participatory, community-led archive documents, preserves, and disseminates art related to displacement and refugeehood. The Amplification Project aims to amplify refugee narratives and agency in archives and greater collective memory, disrupt dehumanizing media and political representations of refugees, and foster awareness about the myriad ways individuals and communities experience and navigate forced displacement from a global perspective. Drawing on my role as co-founder, director, and archivist of The Amplification Project, this paper integrates reflective practitioner insights with scholarly discourse grounded in community archives, participatory archives, art and cultural studies, and migration studies. I will also discuss the concept of “collective interventionist archiving”—a praxis that embodies the project’s ethos. This approach underscores the activist potential of crowd-sourced participatory digital archiving as a means to contest dominant narratives that marginalize or misrepresent individuals and communities, foster solidarity, and resist archival and societal memory erasures.
Rethinking Garden Co-design Paradigm with Large Language Models: A Case for Creating a Community-Engaged Space
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Xuanfang Wang, Yan Huang
In recent years, the burgeoning field of garden co-design, spearheaded by urban residents, has significantly advanced public engagement and satisfied intrinsic needs. Nonetheless, conventional implementations often encounter inefficiencies due to divergences caused by power structures, stakeholder interests, and cognitive disparities between leading designers and participant residents. With recent advancements in the cognitive capabilities and reasoning powers of Large Language Models (LLMs), a novel opportunity has emerged to leverage these technologies in reshaping the paradigm of garden co-design. This paper presents an innovative bio-harmony garden co-design model, which seamlessly integrates LLMs with collaborative design knowledge. This model facilitates a transformative shift towards a resident-centric co-design approach through (i) user requirement translation, (ii) plant category solving, and (iii) horticultural-LLM reasoning. We evaluated the proposed model on the 6,970-square-meter Arconati farm with 53 urban residents participating and providing both qualitative and quantitative feedback. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly enhances key aspects of the co-design process—design engagement, expectation alignment, and feedback responsiveness—by over 21%, compared to traditional designer-led paradigms.
