Dissent by Design | Creativity as a Tool for Change
Alison Page, Tal Fitzpatrick, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Rob Hopkins, Mammalian Diving Reflex (Isabel Ahat + Fjoralba Qerimaj), Tamzin Nugent | facilitated by Jenny Edwards
6 November 2026
Day + Time | Friday | 1pm – 4:30pm
Location | National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, 1 McCoy Circuit, Acton ACT 2601
Entry | General Public $60 | Craft + Design Canberra Member $40 | Booking required
Early Bird Tickets | General Public $48 | Craft + Design Canberra Member $32 | Ends 20 September 2026
Access | Wheelchair accessible, accessible parking, accessible bathroom, assistance animals welcome
Dissent by Design explores creativity as a form of Dissent: the way artists, designers, activists and storytellers use their practice to resist, imagine and rebuild. Across an afternoon of talks and conversation, it asks how the work of designing, building, making and imagining becomes a powerful response to climate pressure, social injustice and unsustainable systems, and how making itself can be an act of witness and resistance and a proposition for the world we want next.
The afternoon brings together leading voices across craft, design, art, performance and dance and closes with the world premiere of a new dance film by Tamzin Nugent.
Alison Page, Tal Fitzpatrick, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Rob Hopkins, Mammalian Diving Reflex (Isabel Ahat + Fjoralba Qerimaj), Tamzin Nugent | facilitated by Jenny Edwards
-
Resisting, reimagining and retrofitting housing
In 2008, Jenny identified an innovative but simple way to improve the quality and reduce the environmental impact of Australian housing. The housing industry at the time was completing lacking in imagination and perpetuated the idea that creating energy efficient and climate resilient homes: 1. could only be done by demolishing old homes and starting again; and 2. was prohibitively expensive.
Jenny’s team resisted this attitude. By integrating science and architecture they created hundreds of joyful, affordable, sustainable homes from existing houses. Houses that were thought to be beyond help. As a result, tonnes of material were saved from landfill; far less energy was needed to run the homes; and the existing flora and fauna on the site were not cleared, preserving valuable biodiversity and cooling landscape. This work both mitigated the effects of, and adapted to, climate change and forced the industry to reimagine the future of Australian housing.
-
Jenny is sole owner and director of Light House ArchiScience, a multi-award-winning business that integrated science and design to deliver highly efficient, all-electric, climate resilient homes — new and renovated — in the Canberra region. She is not an architect or building designer but a scientist with a deep interest in housing and design.With nearly 300 architectural projects completed, and having provided science-based advice on hundreds of retrofits, Light House has shown there is growing demand for smaller, smarter, sustainable, gas-free housing and room for new models of practice in Australian architecture.
Light House have won numerous local and national architecture and housing awards for their smaller, smarter and sustainable projects.
SEE WEBSITE HERE -
Stitching Together Our Unravelling Social Fabric
Australia is in a deep existential crisis. As we grapple with some of the most challenging issues of our time; climate change, social conflict and a reckoning with our true history; the time for great decisions is now. Our dissent is a hothouse for the birth of something new, which we must collectively design in the most purposeful way. The secret to how we design the future of Australia has its origins in 65,000 years of decision-making, which in contemporary terms is blakness – a reclamation of an evolving First Nation’s identity with Country at heart. It is a call to action and a generous invitation to use this ancient wisdom as the thread that binds us back together.
-
Alison Page is a descendant of the Dharawal and Yuin people and is an award-winning creative at the forefront of contemporary Aboriginal design. She is a leading force in the Australian design scene and has an extensive career spanning design, public art, interiors, exhibitions and urban design. She is the founder of House of BLAK, the National Aboriginal Design Agency and Saltwater Freshwater Arts Alliance. In 2015 she was inducted into the Design Institute of Australia Hall of Fame and in 2022 was the Interior Design Excellence Awards Gold Medal winner. Alison was a panelist for eight years on the ABC television program The New Inventors, which showcased Australian innovation. In 2021 she co-authored Design, Building on Country with Paul Memmott, published by Thames and Hudson Australia as part of their First Knowledges Series. She is the Director of the Institute for Designing with Country in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney.
SEE WEBSITE HERE -
Craftivism: Making to Make Change
Reflecting on 10 years of practice as well as current social, political and technological circumstances, practicing artist Dr. Tal Fitzpatrick shares her insights into how and why craft serves as poignant and omnipresent method for making change.
-
Tal Fitzpatrick (b.1988) is an Australian artist, craftivist and researcher based on the unceded lands of the Kombumerri families of the Yugambeh language region. She holds a PhD in Visual Art from the Victorian College of the Arts (2018), a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours from Griffith University (2010) and is best known for her contributions to the field of craftivism.
As a socially engaged artist working primarily with textiles Tal deploys craft as a medium for change making and community building. She has co-led a number of global craftivism projects tackling social, political and environmental issues, several of which are now held by the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Canberra.
Tal has been a finalist in the Alice Prize (2026), was highly commended in the Wollumbin Art Award (2024) and, alongside collaborator Kate Just, received the Incinerator Gallery’s people’s choice award (2020).
SEE WEBSITE HERE -
Atmospheric Traces
Drawing on recent research carried out in California and Tasmania, this talk explores the atmosphere as a register of global environments, technologies, and cultures. The works discussed materialise weather data, archival narratives, and contemporary infrastructures. Through both physical making and digital reconstruction, they bring form to the spectral yet substantial qualities of atmospheric phenomena infused with human traces.
-
Anna Madeleine Raupach is a multidisciplinary artist based on Ngunawal/Ngambri land, Canberra, Australia, and a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU) School of Art & Design. Through multimedia installations, moving image, augmented reality, and mixed media artworks, her practice engages with science and technology to critically address socio-political issues enmeshed with climate change. Recent work has developed through the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (2026), a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Southern California Expanded Animation program (2024), and an ANAT Synapse Residency with Mount Stromlo Observatory (2022). Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia, QUT Art Museum, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Canberra Contemporary, Liverpool Powerhouse, and the Bandung Photography Triennale.
SEE WEBSITE HERE -
How to Fall in Love with the Future
In this presentation Rob Hopkins will ask what would our response to the climate and nature emergency look like if rather than just talking about collapse and extinction and seeing this as an information deficit problem, we set out to nurture longing for a low carbon, more just, equal and beautiful future? He will provide many examples of what this looks like in practice, including his own practice of time travel as a tool for activists. Curious? See you there.
-
Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, an author, artist, activist and public speaker. His most recent book is 'How to Fall in Love with the Future: a time traveller's guide to changing the world' which has been longlisted for the 2026 Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing. 'Field Recordings from the Future', the immersive touring show created with ambient music artist Mr Kit, will be touring the UK from late November. His monthly newsletter is called 'The Time Traveller's Gazette'.
SEE WEBSITE HERE -
SMYLE Like a Mammal
Isabel Ahat has collaborated with Mammalian Diving Reflex since 2007, when she was 12. Fjoralba Qerimaj joined in 2018, when she was 17. Isabel is now a Chartered Professional Accountant and, in addition to her role with Mammalian as Assistant Finance Manager, is an Associate Producer, often devising, writing, and producing our work, as well as co-leading Droppings, our emerging artist training and international exchange program.
In addition to being an Associate Artist with Mammalian, travelling the world and leading and devising our new work, Alba is a co-founder of Limbo Lab, a Milan-based cultural and artistic organization aimed at combating gender disparities in the arts and cultural industries.
Isabel will outline her role in developing Mammalian's Succession Model of Youth Labour Engagement (SMYLE) and together with Alba, share its principles, its effects on their own lives, and how it has travelled elsewhere, as walking, talking, smiling proof of the power of really long-term youth engagement.
-
Isabel Ahat is a Tkaronto (Toronto)-based artist and the Associate Producer and Finance Manager at Mammalian Diving Reflex. At the age of twelve, she first joined Mammalian as a Food Critic for Eat the Street in Tkaronto, ON, Canada (2009). As one of the original crew from the Tkaronto neighbourhood of Parkdale, Isabel was an important part of the company’s succession strategy, which is focused on diversifying the cultural sector with young creators of colour. Isabel currently produces many of Mammalian’s new works, including Adrift, Walk With Me While I Remember You and Everything Has Disappeared. She continues to tour Mammalian’s productions and social-engagement methodologies, both locally and internationally, all while managing their finances.
Fjoralba Qerimaj is a Milan-based artist who has collaborated with Mammalian Diving Reflex since 2018, beginning with the development of The Last Minutes Before Mars, which premiered in Italy at Milan's FOG Performing Arts Festival in 2023. She has toured with Mammalian around the world, delivering shows in Portugal, Australia, the USA, Italy, South Korea, Japan and Canada, as well as leading Mammalian's masterclass Compelling Telling and contributing to the research study Casa Italia. In 2025, she co-founded Limbo Lab, a Milan-based cultural project offering free workshops in fields like sound system, DJing and theatrical lighting, directed mostly at women and second-generation immigrants. She currently works at BASE Milano as a Community Manager supporting UNDER30 projects.
SEE WEBSITE HERE -
Who's Designing the Future? Climate Storytelling Through the Voices We Need Most
Core premise:
Climate change communication has largely been dominated by science, policy and institutions. While vital, those frameworks often fail to emotionally reach communities or reflect the lived realities of those already adapting, surviving and innovating.
My talk would explore how artists can act as cultural translators — shifting climate communication from data into embodied experience — and why the voices of First Nations peoples, migrants, elders, disabled communities and young people are not secondary to the climate conversation, but central to it.
-
Tamzin Nugent is a Canberra-based Creative Producer, Director and storyteller whose work sits at the intersection of film, performance, community engagement and social impact. With more than 25 years’ experience delivering multidisciplinary arts projects, she creates immersive works that amplify underrepresented voices and inspire meaningful conversations around climate, equity and social change.Her collaborative practice brings together artists, First Nations communities, multicultural groups, people with disability, young people and industry partners to create powerful, inclusive stories that connect audiences emotionally with complex issues. As Creative Producer and Director of 7 Reasons Why, Tamzin, alongside her creative partner Liz Lea has led the development of an ambitious climate-action dance film that partners with renewable energy organisations, sustainability-focussed businesses and community groups across the ACT.
A graduate of NIDA, Tamzin is passionate about using creativity as a catalyst for change, believing that the arts have the unique ability to build empathy, foster collaboration and imagine more sustainable and inclusive futures.
SEE WEBSITE HERE
Proudly supported by ACT Government
Images | Symposium Making and Remaking Canberra 2024 | Photo by 5 Foot Photography