Some practices are built around output; Mariam Ella Arcilla’s is built around people. A Filipina (Bicolano) and Singaporean (Chinese) cultural producer, writer and organiser, her work centres on gathering as a method – using art, food and dialogue to hold space for communities to connect, learn and reconfigure how they see themselves.

It’s on Gadigal Country, Sydney, that she runs Magenta House – a reimagined domestic space in Redfern that has become a living site for exchange. What happens there resists easy definition: workshops, feeding sessions, reading rooms, soul-nourishing conversations. At its core is a belief that hospitality can be a creative practice – one that builds trust, fosters kinship and makes people feel held.

Her work draws from a life lived across diasporas, with family ties spanning the Philippines, Singapore and beyond. Food, language and memory sit at the centre of it all. Not as symbols, but as active tools for rebraiding identity – connecting people back to home, even when home exists in multiple places at once.

Across projects like the Equity-Builder at Arts House and her ongoing work with Magenta House, Mariam has developed frameworks that don’t just talk about equity, but operationalise it. In an industry that often stops at surface-level inclusion, her practice goes further – building the conditions for cultural work to be sustained, shared and led by the communities it belongs to.