Serbian and Yugoslav architect and theorist Aleksandar Deroko’s interwar architecture and critical writings on heritage are largely unknown outside Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Aware of his geographical and cultural ‘borderline position’ between “East” and “West”, Deroko offers a relational critical regionalist framework that share some similarities with indigenous understandings of heritage in te ao Māori.

Deroko argued that functional architecture must meet the physical and spiritual needs of people to enable cultural protocols and protect their ways of living. ‘The climate’ has an active role, shaping vernacular architecture in ‘dialogue’ with people. Deroko’s relational understanding of heritage traced relationships between peoples, inseparable from their natural-cultural and temporal contexts. Creative potential in the present drew inspiration from understanding the relational intangible heritage shaping architectural innovations of the past. In the context of Tūhono, this dialogue illuminates new ways of weaving relational heritage spaces across indigenous and settler cultures in Aotearoa.

Itchy, scratchy, woollen blankets do more than cover beds—they connect heritage and identity in material and political ways. This presentation for the 2026 ACHS conference will focus on two engagements with woollen blankets to demonstrate the connection to heritage past, present, and future. The first example demonstrates how contemporary Indigenous artists, in particular Māori artists, use woollen blankets to make anti-colonial statements. The second example presents how local artisans, specifically in Aotearoa, use woollen blankets, historically produced at various mills across the North and South islands, to connect heritage to themes of regionalism and nostalgia. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research working closely with makers for a forthcoming monograph, this presentation connects to the conference of Tūhono (weaving relational heritage spaces) by synthesizing how woollen blankets are entangled and interwoven in decolonial and indigenisation practices of heritage and identity through art and craft.

When Palmerston North city council officials couldn't identify what happened in 1871 during the city's 150th anniversary in 2021, Warren and Virginia Warbrick researched the city's origins. They determined the 'start' date was arguably 23 July 1864, not 1871. The Warbricks launched an "undercover geeky graffiti" campaign and sent Anniversary 1864 cards to 200 locals, later developing a one-day workshop "Rākau: Being a Palmerstonian." Of the more than 400 subsequent participants, many report that learning local histories and visiting significant sites transformed their relationship with the city and sense of identity. Virginia will share their activist art techniques and storytelling methods.

This paper redefines intangible cultural heritage beyond skills and knowledge and into a sensory space of lived experience with material, colour and cloth. Two art residencies at the Higeta Indigo Workshop in Mashiko, Japan, gave rise to a series of contemporary compositions. Ideas and approaches were exchanged through a craft and its material. There was a sharing of practice, a fusion of knowledge and skills, a common language without words. A coil of dyed thread became a metaphor for creative communication, a plexus of lines, the point where ideas are bound together at the intersection of material heritage and new making. This presentation explores how the experience of practice and field study became a conduit for the transmission of intangible cultural heritage and its future. Through creative dialogue in this theatre of making, the intangible was made tangible in another form, the reconfiguration of traditional craft in contemporary textiles.