Beyond the fixed: Sāmoan digital spaces, errantry, and decolonising architecture

Abstract

This article examines how siapo, vā, diaspora, and digital practice converge to produce an interior without ground: a digital space not anchored by built form or territorial enclosure, yet lined, activated, and sustained through relation. It argues that online siapo produced and circulated by Sāmoan women constitutes a form of spatial production. Drawing on hashtag analysis of fifty social-media posts, the article shows how captions, tags, and circulation extend embodied cultural knowledge into digital environments and organise relations among identity, family, memory, and place. Édouard Glissant’s concepts of errantry and relation are placed in dialogue with vā to theorise diasporic movement without reducing it to rootlessness or exile. Online siapo thereby exposes the colonial categories through which architectural knowledge has privileged fixity, material permanence, and territorial ground, while offering a Sāmoan relational account of architecture as spatial practice.