Working with the creative directors for the Australian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, we built an evolving identity around their exhibition Unsettling Queenstown.

The exhibition explores the town of Queenstown, both the real town in Tasmania and a fictionalised representation for other ‘Queenstowns’ around the world, and the legacy of colonialism. As Aboriginal Country was overwritten by colonial maps, the process of ‘de-mapping’ is reflected in our concept — the letters making up Queenstown placed around an implied map of the town, fading at different rates but never fully removing their impact. The word ‘Unsettling’ stays static, anchoring the composition.

Copper evokes the town’s ties to copper mining, and the polluted Queen River, while the deep forest green represents the original landscape. The identity is typeset in Empire Gothic, a custom typeface we developed based on the signage of the Empire Hotel represented in the centre of the exhibition.

Responding to the theme is the ‘Open Archive’, a compilation of decolonisation tactics submitted by architects around Australia. These are presented on panels, with accompanying tear off sheets that can be collected by visitors and bound into a book to take away.