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Advocacy
Guiding Intercultural Awareness
Working at the nexus of solidarity and innovation, the Lo—TEK Institute collaborates with educators, knowledge keepers, designers, artists, historians, and environmentalists to develop and implement community-driven changes that amplify Indigenous knowledge systems, promote sustainable development, and foster resilient landscapes and societies.
At the launch of the institute we are housing four projects—one that advocates for indigenous rights, one that catalogs a constellation of indigenous learning spaces, one that empowers natural building awareness, and one that supports indigenous artists and designers by providing land for synergistic practices. We are excited to update you as each project evolves at its own pace.
PROJECT 1
The SOoU
An Oral Contract aligning intent and safeguarding Indigenous IP created in collaboration with Comar Mollé LLP
The Smart Oath of Understanding (SOoU) accompanied the Symbiocene (2021) art piece originally commissioned by the City of London for the Barbican Museum’s exhibition ‘Our Time on Earth’. Exhibited as a sound shower, the SOoU was created in collaboration with Comar Mollé LLP. The SOoU is an oral contract that addresses Indigenous intellectual property rights by stripping away the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) typically used in similar circumstances, to its bare, legal essence. Created to protect Indigenous intellectual property rights, the SOoU is a legally binding commitment that bridges the gap between Western and Indigenous approaches to agreement-making. It reconciles the differences between Western contract law and Indigenous concepts of collective obligation, often based on orally shared understandings.
PROJECT 2
Nomadic Schoolhouse
Network
The most effective way to boost Indigenous resilience and self-determination is to center community led ways of learning and time-place priorities. With a focus towards women—who play an especially crucial role as knowledge holders and teachers—the Nomadic Schoolhouse Network aims to catalog and connect Indigenous grassroots initiatives that uphold, preserve and pass on Indigenous knowledge in support of nature based technologies.
Centering Indigenous-Led Learning
PROJECT 3
Living Earth Challenge
Competition in Partnership with the Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning and Design (ISAPD)
The Lo—TEK Institute is working with the Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning and Design to uplift alternative perspectives around design and building. We are looking to enroll schools, organizations and communities across the nation and potentially the globe, to empower community based design thinking & earthen building. It poses the question—what shifts the purpose of development and recenters the health, longevity and spirit of humanity and nature? What are the alternatives to profit based systems when it comes to technological advancement? We believe that individuals and communities have to physically engage with nature in inspiring and synergistic ways, to truly envision how design can conceive what the future will look like.
PROJECT 4
Lo—TEK Ancestral Artist Residency
The Lo—TEK Institute is working with organizations who have land to donate, with possible plots in Arkansas and New York State. This land would be gifted to a group of designers, artists or innovators, to showcase a project with its particular set of practices to interested schools and communities. Our hope is to donate the lands and projects upon completion to the first peoples of these territories.
Artist Residency for Indigenous Designers, Builders, and Architects
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