We’re Weaving Oceans is a multi-year cultural platform developed by BANG-ON Collective to remember Austronesian ancestry as a living oceanic network. Across artist residencies, First Nations exchanges, children’s programs, commissions and public gatherings, the program reconnects Australia and Southeast Asia through the deeper histories of movement, kinship, trade, ceremony, language and cultural transmission that have travelled across our seas for millennia.

Rather than understanding the ocean as a border, We’re Weaving Oceans approaches it as a relational archive. It asks how artists, Elders, children, cultural workers and communities might reassemble connections disrupted by colonisation, migration and modern nation-building. In doing so, the program places contemporary artistic practice within much older regional relationships, where Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific are understood through shared histories of navigation, exchange, ecological knowledge and cultural imagination.

At its core is an interest in re-engaging with our Southeast Asian neighbours through these oceanic histories. While the Philippines remains a central point of connection, the program is actively building relationships with artists, cultural organisations and communities in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. These exchanges recognise that the region’s cultural histories have never been confined to contemporary borders, but have long been shaped by the movement of people, ideas, technologies and belief systems across interconnected maritime worlds. Longitudinally, the program seeks to extend these relationships further into Oceania, creating opportunities for dialogue and collaboration between Southeast Asian and Pasifika artists and communities, and exploring the ocean as a shared cultural geography rather than a dividing line between regions.

The program unfolds through three interconnected streams.

First Nations Exchange activates remembering through Indigenous-to-Indigenous dialogue. Bringing together Australian First Nations artists and Elders with Dumagat, Tausug, Talaandig and T’boli knowledge holders in the Philippines, this stream explores rivers, weaving, music, performance, oral history and cultural mapping as living systems of transmission. These exchanges centre cultural authority, community protocols and the responsibilities of artists working across ancestral knowledge.

Children, Nature and Place explores civic spaces through the eyes of future generations. Working with children in Sydney (Australia), Iloilo and Bacolod (Philippines), the project invites young people to become co-curators of a festival in their own neighbourhoods. Through walks, workshops, play, listening, storytelling and shared exchange, children imagine how place might be understood through ecology, memory, care and cultural belonging.

Responsive Residencies activate remembering through contemporary collaboration. Artists and curators including Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Leeroy New, Anandavalli, Leila Shirazi, Tian Zhang and others work across Manila, Sydney, Melbourne and the wider South East Asia region through exchanges, commissions, research, public programs and community-engaged projects. These residencies connect museums, artist-run initiatives, grassroots communities and cultural institutions, creating pathways for artists to move between local histories and international conversations.

Together, these streams form a constellation of relationships that repositions Australia within its oceanic neighbourhood.We’re Weaving Oceans is not simply an exchange program. It is a curatorial proposition: that remembering shared histories, offers artists, institutions and communities an opportunity to think beyond colonial cartographies and towards more reciprocal, culturally grounded and enduring regional futures.