If you haven’t noticed, there’s a movement rising. The groundswell is gathering force. And here, in little Aotearoa, we keep finding ourselves right in the heart of it — sometimes charging ahead at the front, sometimes holding the door open and stepping aside so our global kin can fill the room.

This movement I speak of is the global revolution of Indigenous architecture: a force that is resistant, ambitious, gentle, sometimes fragile, yet resilient — insistent and unyielding. It is the quiet but persistent power of indigenuity (indigenous ingenuity), reclaiming spaces that have long tried — and still try — to erase our presence through the global imperial colonial project.

Objectspace has done it again, holding open the door with generosity and thoughtfulness. Its new exhibition, Building an archive of Indigenous architecture: Joar Nango and collaborators, is another powerful reclamation of space – critical to discussions on Indigenous place-making, knowledge and creativity. It’s a statement: we are here, and we will be counted.

Walking into this gallery feels like stepping through a portal. The walls themselves stretch, holding more than what the eye perceives. The show lands softly in Objectspace’s main gallery, with lilac walls, textiles, books, paintings, cushions and chairs assembled to invite you to sit and engage. It’s a sitting room, a library — warm and welcoming. All it needs is a fireplace and a cup of hot chocolate. You’re wrapped in the design collaboration of Joar Nango, with contributions from Eveliina Sarapää, Magnus Antaris Tuolja, Katarina Spik Skum and Ken Are Bongo.

Building an archive of Indigenous architecture is an iteration of Nango’s work Girjegumpi (the Sámi Architecture Library), which has, since 2018, travelled to multiple countries and across Sápmi territory (the traditional lands of the Sámi, covering the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia). As noted by the Objectspace description: “Named for the Northern Sámi terms ‘gumpi’ (a mobile cabin on runners) and ‘girji’ (book), Girjegumpi is a space for education and dialogue, addressing issues relevant to Indigenous architecture and resistance and Indigenisation. Girjegumpi is a gathering space, a reading room for study and a dreaming place for Indigenous imagination.” As such, one of the critical aspects of the exhibition was the pre-work “study tour in which he visited Māori architects, artists and iwi to understand the whenua of Aotearoa and context in which Girjegumpi would sit”.

Following the study tour, a wānanga was held at Objectspace before the show’s opening, where Aotearoa-based academics, architects, students and artists were invited to bring texts of their own to add to the space. I was lucky enough to attend this wānanga and the theme of generosity overflowed in the room. Everyone shared texts that inspired and empowered their relationships to place-making, with a heavy overtone of Indigenous excellence and potentiality — past, present and future.

The recognition of Indigenous architecture is not a passing trend; it is a reclamation. It is an unapologetic revolution rooted in ancestral knowledge, collective memory and the unwavering determination of Indigenous peoples to assert their rightful place in a world built on colonial foundations, built on indigenous land. For the Sámi people of Sápmi, this revolution is sketched in the snow and carved into the timber of their homelands. Architects like Joar Nango are not merely designing buildings and installations or orchestrating discussions; they are weaving stories of resistance and revitalisation. His work, often collaborative, challenges the Western notion of architecture as static and sterile. It honours the fluid, relational systems of Sámi culture – reminding us that architecture and art, like sovereignty, can be acts of both creation and defiance.

Nango’s work links Sámi philosophy to global movements of Indigenous self-determination. Through collaborations with artists, scholars and craftspeople, he shows that knowledge resides not just in institutions but in materials, stories and relationships. Like Gil Scott-Heron’s words, “the revolution will not be televised”, this movement doesn’t make headlines. It lives in the everyday acts of cultural reclamation: the stitching of reindeer hide, the bending of birch saplings, the grounding of place in memory. Sámi architecture, like other Indigenous movements worldwide, is not just about building structures; it’s about dismantling colonial systems, retelling our stories and reclaiming our voices.

The revolution is here. It is lived, it is felt and it is built into the very land itself.