Badu Gili: Healing Spirit

The team responded to the complex challenge of translating deeply personal and culturally significant artworks into a dynamic large-scale projection, while preserving their integrity and meaning. Working with multiple First Nations artists - including Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami, located in a remote region of the Amazon - required culturally sensitive collaboration across languages, time zones, and creative practices. A major technical challenge was capturing the intricate detail of shellwork and translating it into motion, requiring high-resolution photogrammetry and 3D modelling. The work also needed to fit precisely to the Opera House sails, demanding precision in composition and mapping across curved architectural surfaces.

To bring Badu Gili: Healing Spirit to life, the team engaged in a process of cultural listening, artistic collaboration, and technical precision. Artwork exchanges and conversations with the artists helped shape a shared visual language. Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami’s drawings were animated frame by frame, while the Timbery and Russell shellwork was captured using photogrammetry and reimagined in 3D. A key breakthrough came during on-site projection testing, where light and motion were fine-tuned to honour the detail and tone of each piece. The final result is a seamless projection that respects individual artworks while forming a unified story across the sails.

Badu Gili: Healing Spirit creates significant cultural and societal impact by sharing First Nations stories with thousands of visitors on one of the world’s most recognisable landmarks. The project amplifies Indigenous voices from both Australia and the Amazon, fostering cross-cultural understanding and respect. As a free, high-profile public artwork, it offers an accessible experience that deepens public engagement with First Nations knowledge systems. Environmentally, the projection reused existing infrastructure with minimal footprint. Commercially, it strengthens the Sydney Opera House’s cultural leadership and contributes to its visitor experience, drawing audiences into a deeper, more meaningful connection with place and Country.

Badu Gili: Healing Spirit is a luminous celebration of First Nations knowledge, art, and ancestral presence, projected on Tubowgule - the sacred site "where the knowledge waters meet". The work features multiple shellworks by the late Esme Timbery and her daughter Marilyn Russell, alongside intricate prints and weavings by Esme's son and Marilyn's brother, Steven Russell. These pieces, deeply rooted in the Bidjigal traditions of La Perouse, honour the enduring strength of matriarchal lineage. Animated across a shifting oceanic landscape, their chapter reflects the passage of cultural knowledge across generations - a conversation between mother and children that continues through material, memory, and place. In the second chapter, Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami invites viewers into the heart of the Amazon, where his drawings bring to life the xapiripë - ancestral spirits central to Yanomami cosmology. These spirit beings, including jaguars, butterflies and forest guardians, emerge during a shamanic curing ceremony, performed when community members fall ill. Joseca’s work speaks to the interconnectedness of physical and spiritual health, and the intimate relationship between humans and the forest. Together, these stories form a shared visual language of healing, kinship, and reverence for the natural world - animated across one of the world’s most iconic architectural canvases.