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Short abstract

Embodied counter-mapping grounded in Dharug and Gamilaraay Indigenous design methods invites participants in Poland to sense London’s buried waters, ecologies, and colonial histories through walking, yarning, and oral reflection translated into text, cultivating belonging, reciprocity, and healing.

Long abstract

This contribution presents an embodied counter-mapping workshop grounded in Indigenous design methodologies developed through a Dharug and Gamilaraay practice-based PhD and teaching centred on Remembering Country, Country Sensing Design, and Design Relationality. The work is led by a Dharug and Gamilaraay designer and Associate Professor of the Built Environment whose intertwined Indigenous and English ancestral lineages position her in relation to both unceded Australian lands and the imperial geographies of Europe.

Situated within a conference in Poland while counter-mapping London as an ecological and cultural landscape shaped by empire, extraction, rupture, and displacement, the workshop asks whether those connected to colonising histories can learn ethically from the oldest continuous living cultures on Earth. Walking, sensing, yarning, and collective making invite participants to attune to buried waterways, altered soils, migrant plant ecologies, atmospheric relations, and more-than-human presences that continue to connect Britain to the many Countries transformed through colonial expansion.

Reflection occurs first as oral relational witnessing, shared collectively and grounded in Indigenous knowledge practice. This spoken reflection is then carefully translated into written form as a trace of relational learning rather than extraction. Decolonisation is approached not as reversal or accusation but as a practice of love enacted through reciprocity, custodial awareness, across time. The workshop contributes an embodied oral-to-text reflective method to art, science, and technology studies, demonstrating how Indigenous design knowledge can open ethical space within imperial geographies toward futures grounded in belonging, love, ecological renewal.

Counter-mapping; Design Relationality; Remembering Country; Indigenous methodologies; decolonising design; ecological healing.