The 2025 Festival of Landscape Architecture, organised by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA), will take place in Nipaluna / Hobart from 19 to 21 October 2025, on the unceded lands of the Palawa people. The theme for this year’s edition is “DARK”—an inquiry into landscape through absence, ambiguity, and non-linearity.

Curated by Miriam Shevland, Simone Bliss, and Jerry de Gryse, with Theresa Sainty as cultural advisor, the festival aims to address the profession’s engagement with uncertainty—both historical and contemporary. The curators frame DARK as a provocation: to reflect on the tensions between visibility and invisibility, exposure and concealment, urgency and pause.

The programme will feature contributions from a range of international and local practitioners and thinkers, including:
– Hannah Hopewell (Louisiana State University, USA)
– Anna Edwards (Australia)
– Ben Essex (Australia)
– Owen Café (Australia)

The three-day event includes lectures, discussions, site visits, and social gatherings. Events will take place across various locations in and around Hobart, with emphasis on field-based engagement and situated learning. Core themes include:

Dark as History: confronting colonial legacies and dispossession
Dark as Ecology: light pollution, night-time ecologies, fire, climate
Dark as Process: intuition, doubt, incomplete knowledge
Dark as Design Condition: working without clarity, certainty, or resolution

In addition to the main programme, pre- and post-festival events will offer further opportunities for reflection and connection.