Sean Connelly

Architecture for ‘Āina

A lecture by Sean Connelly, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP. Professor Mario Gooden, Interim Director of GSAPP’s MArch Program, and Dominic Leong, Adjunct Assistant Professor, will provide the response.

Sean Connelly (b.1984, O‘ahu, Oceania) is an artist-architect operating as an expert witness geomancer-mystic based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Works include sculpture, land art, experimental cartography, new media, landscape, filmmaking. Sean identifies as a ghost in the field—a queer, diasporic Pacific-Islander American white-passing person-of-color, local settler grandchild of immigrants raised in a culturally Hawaiian-Filipino-Portuguese family from Kalihi and He'eia. He/They operates patiently and collaboratively in the outliers of the profession, collaborating with those willing to legitimately intervene and address the complexities of indigenous futures for Hawai‘i. Sean’s accumulative work over the past decade has pioneered ideas in art, architecture, landscape, and design theory around Hawai‘i, the Pacific, and beyond. Their work strives to dismantle and replace architectures that oppress indigenous thinking and ways of knowing. Sean incorporated AFTER OCEANIC (Projects for Architecture Landscape Infrastructure and Art) to represent his/their artistic social practice emerging to assist in the contemporary recovery of indigenous systems (e.g. moku, ahupua‘a) as the basis for an ecological revolution in architecture, landscape, and urbanism. After Oceanic’s combined work over the past decade promotes justice-advancing futures around the dynamics of indigenous geography today.

Organized by Columbia GSAPP. Free and open to the public. GSAPP is committed to providing universal access to all of our virtual events. Please contact events@arch.columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

This lecture is held in person and is open to Columbia University affiliates with a Green Pass, and will be live-streamed for the general public on the GSAPP YouTube Channel.

This event content is equivalent to 1 AIA/CES total learning credit, 1 total credit earned. AIA. Please contact events@arch.columbia.edu for more information.