All Right AnglesAll Right Angles

Last September, the All Right Angles residential workshop, held in Lunuganga, Sri Lanka, used the garden as a lens through which to engage with architecture, art, and ecology. Three local and international facilitators, selected through an open call, led 11 participants through sessions ranging from building a speculative counter-archive with Setareh Noorani (Netherlands), to experiencing the garden through an ecological lens with Professor Sarath Kotagama (Sri Lanka), to uncovering bodies as repositories of knowledge with Umeshi Rajeendra (Sri Lanka).

The guided sessions were interspersed with boat trips to the Sri Lankan island of Honduwa to catch a glimpse of hog deer at dawn; acts of active reading and exchanging ideas with Colomboscope in the To Lunuganga reading room; stargazing; and a special screening of the film Bawa's Garden (2022). The participants, from Jaffna, Monaragala, Badulla, Batticaloa, Aluthgama and Colombo, included architecture students, architects, artists and designers.

All Right Angles was organised as part of the Creative Island – From Forest School to Sensory Architectures project by EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture) Sri Lanka, the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, Colomboscope, and Kälam (Jaffna).

EUNIC is the European network of national cultural institutes and organisations for culture, with 36 members from all EU member states and associated countries. EUNIC Sri Lanka – consisting of the Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut, the British Council, the Italian Embassy and the Dutch Embassy – takes an integrated approach to building cultural relations and creative cooperation, and promoting diversity.

Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher and curator at the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), and a member of various experimental collectives. In her projects and artistic contributions, she uses various media to explore ways of making public and embodying, questioning processes of trauma and time, always moving in the grey space between academic research and art.

Her current curatorial research at the Nieuwe Instituut focuses on the qualitative, paradigm-shifting notions of decoloniality, feminisms, queer ecologies, non-institutional representations and the implications of the collective, more-than-human body in architecture, its heritage, and ambiguous future scenarios. She was part of the curatorial team for the London Design Biennale 2023 and its Remapping Collaborations working group, and has served on the selection committees for the Nieuwe Instituut’s annual Call for Fellows. Setareh holds an MSc in Architecture (TU Delft, cum laude).

Sarath Kotagama is an ornithologist and environmentalist from Sri Lanka. He holds a BSc from the University of Colombo and a PhD from the University of Aberdeen on the behavioural ecology of the rose-ringed parakeet. Kotagama has been a lecturer at the University of Colombo and the Open University of Sri Lanka, and Director of the Department of Wildlife Conservation. He was appointed Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Colombo and later became Professor Emeritus. Kotagama has been a consultant to various organisations and has held leadership positions in conservation societies. He received the 2003 Distinguished Service Award for Environmental Education and Journalism from the International Society for Conservation Biology. The endemic toad species Duttaphrynus kotagamai was named in his honour. In 2017, he was awarded the title of Vidya Jyothi by the Government of Sri Lanka.

Umeshi Rajeendra is a Sri Lankan/Ilankai born dance artist, educator, and choreographer whose artistic and academic output since 2012 has addressed intersectional solidarity through the production of original works. Umeshi received her MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts, USA, where she was one of the recipients of the President’s Fund for Excellence. She holds a BA in Dance and Economics from Denison University, USA. She has worked with renowned international artists such as Dada Masilo, Netta Yerushalmy, Jesse Zaritt, Sandra Mathern-Smith, Julie Fox, Stafford Barry, and Olivier Tarpaga, and has gained extensive experience in America, Europe and South Asia.

Umeshi is the co-founder and artistic director of MeshGround: A Platform for Movement Arts, and is currently also a visiting lecturer at universities, striving to unearth our embodied relational agency, where discomfort, difference and alterity are embraced to challenge our performativity.