With a vast hand-drawn genealogical chart spanning more than 2,400 generations and 65,000 years, and work that reaches so far back into time that it includes the common ancestors of every human and all living entities, Venice Biennale 2024 winner Archie Moore has, in our opinion, cemented his place as the world's greatest living graphic designer. SP met up with Archie Moore's Venice curator Ellie Buttrose from QAGOMA (Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art) to talk about this monumental work.

SP: 'Kith and Kin' can be seen as an extraordinary piece of information design, as well as a piece of art. Information design, as a branch of graphic design, is about making complex data visually and instantly understandable to an audience. Sometimes seeing something is much more powerful than, say, reading something. 

EB: Yes, that was really key for Archie. He wanted to make 65,000 years visual and understandable. What really does 65,000 years look like? And by doing that, by giving people an image, does that allow them to see and acknowledge and grapple with what that length of connection means? I think a lot of people will understand, thanks to period dramas, what the 15th century looks like, or the pyramids 4,000 years ago. But to understand 10,000 or 30,000 or even 65,000 years ago, that is something else.

SP: Long before Aristotle gave us our Western ideas of limiting time to 'past, present and future', indigenous cultures have a much more complex experience of time, where different aspects of ‘time' are overlapping with the present . Those concepts of time are hard for someone like me to really get a good grasp on but I'm wondering if the feeling of standing in that pavilion in Venice, experiencing Moores' work, actually explains that?

EB: Yes, trying to understand that sense of coexistence of time by having 65,000 years of ancestors who are co-present with you in this space, you get the sense that they are not things that are behind us or have happened in the past. Actually, they're there right in front of you. And seeing it, experiencing it, can have huge difference for understanding what the concept of time can truly mean, not just in our Western sense. And those ancestors are not just people. He's written names for animals and plants and places of country and if those ancestors are present in the now then our idea of family extends beyond the human. 

Also, note that the family tree is drawn all the way onto the ceiling as well, not just the walls. It makes it look celestial and when we think about the cosmos and we think about deep time, he's also referencing astronomers and the way that the ancestors are also present with us in the stars as well as the black patches between the stars, which are resting places. Archie's been able to capture everything in this one information graphic, as you call it. I think that's just an amazing rewiring. And I think, again, it's that thing of being able to kind of visualise everything in one go, and see the world differently. So this work is not art about art, it's art about the world.

SP: In my opinion, design is most effective when the idea trumps the need for much 'designing' to actually happen at all. The aesthetic or the design in 'kith and kin' beautifully works in service of the idea. Can you tell me a little bit about what your and Archie's design process was like? Did you go through many different iterations or did the strength of the project make the design a given?

EB: We worked very closely with Kevin O'Brien, who is a principal at the BVN Architecture here in Brisbane. He is working on multi-million dollar projects, but he always has an ‘anything for Archie’ attitude, which speaks to the kind of artist Archie is. And so we worked really closely with Kevin to design the space. 

If you’ve seen photos of the Australian Pavilion it looks a bit like a black box, sort of like a mausoleum. So we leaned into that when it came to the design. The reflection pool, in which the deaths in custody documents are placed over, is very common all over the world in memorial spaces.

When it comes to the drawing of the family tree, we could have turned this into a printed wallpaper and not done it by hand. But doing it by hand have such a different emotional register. It’s also the labor and love that people are overwhelmed by, right? 

When Archie started drawing the family tree, it it all starts with ‘Me’. There’s a little box that says ‘Me’ in it and it grows out. Western family trees start with the apical ancestors and move down whereas he's starts from himself and moves out because there is no final ancestor. It goes on forever and into infinity. He started at the ceiling and then worked the whole way down. Because an artwork on this scale can’t be spray fixed, it also became about the fragility of the work. We had people come in, and even though they're told at the door that it's fragile, people do go and touch it. And that human contact also creates a new connection to the work. But it can be wiped away, it’s that fragile. 

But those smudges created by visitors are seperate from the large ‘holes’ in the artwork.