Anna Conrick Research Book

Ethnographic approaches to the in-between

Strange Spaces: Un-making and the practice of forgetting

Thank you Richard Haridy Millie Catlin Sharon Sclarr Olivia Pintos-Lopez Daiana Voinescu Vashti Evans Brendan Harwood David Patterson Christopher Boutsinis Kezia Meskanin Little Roxy

1 Prologue 3 Preface

To Collect To Add To Remove To Write To Assemble

23 Un-Making

To Collect To Add To Remove To Write To Assemble

To Collect To Add To Remove To Write To Assemble

7 Mnemonic

To Collect To Add To Remove To Write To Assemble

5 Introduction

Objects:

Collective remembering through the built environment

Dialectics of presence and absence 37 History

Place as author and story 49 Terrain

Vague:

In-betweens and the evocative potential of invisible places 59 Epilogue 61 Bibliography

Contents

63 Appendix

Written and Compiled by: Anna Conrick

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Prologue

Ihelped t started with a collection I discovered early this year as I my parents sort and pack, throw away and donate, clean and repaint. They were moving out of Melbourne, and it was the right time in their lives to take stock of all the things that had taken up residence in draws and cupboards, under beds and in crawlspaces. In a box labeled “Eileen� that came home after the funeral and remained unopened for years, I found thirty eight thimbles, individually wrapped and carefully packed away.

I remember this collection from my childhood, proudly displayed in a wooden case that sat on the wall above the old TV. Back then they were all too big for my fingers.

Through the thimbles I remember the house they lived in, and the things they were surrounded by, and the smells and the sounds. Twenty five years on and those memories, though sepia tinged, are still as tangible as ever.

The power of an object to evoke a world of imagination is wonderful to me, and precious too, because the moments they evoke are a part of me.

Nostalgia is not the focus, but the starting point of this process. Explorations of the connections between memory, history, and design practice raise more questions than answers, and I do not expect to arrive at any conclusions by the time this year is complete, however through the questioning, a personal process is evolving, and an approach to practice which is a place to begin, again.

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Preface

Narrative

Act

Archive

Maker

Trace

Object

Future Present

Past

Memory History

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Introduction

M y interest lies in things leftover and unwanted - in the traces and residues of inhabitation, in the forgotten

Using approaches to site that are derived from anthropological methodology, I question the symbolic capital of site - the ways in which we understand and evaluate the layers of meaning and value apportioned to the built environment. Is there a way to reveal symbolic capital as an embedded state? How do our readings of site contribute to our native understandings of symbolic capital? How can a process of un-making through re-making act as a catalyst to reveal these veiled value systems? How can a practice of spatial evaluation contribute to design praxis? These questions are still emerging within my practice and thinking, and will form the foundation of the second part of this year, with a thesis project that grapples with the question:

rather than the remembered. Exploring the agency of the object and the uncanny conditions of the void through my work in strange and forgotten places, I engaging with the potential of the in-between as it exists in our every day life; objects and places that are in a state of flux, that occupy Symbolic Capital: the same conceptual realm as the space between memThe value of status be- ory and forgetting, presence stowed upon objects or peo- and absence. My personal ple by those in recognised process, developed over the positions of authority. This semester, is fourfold - concapital may be embedded sisting of collection, writing, in the built environment remaking and assembly - as or urban form of a city as a active approaches to site. symbolic representation of that land’s cultural value.

Over the course of this seEstablishing ways of determining symbolic capital mester I have attempted to have flowed from sociolog- reveal and recompose spaical and anthropological tial experience through exapproaches, wherein close periments and material instudy of surrounding social terventions which sit across and economic structures both euclidean space and provide context for assess- across temporal axes. ing symbolic capital.

PREVIOUS PAGE: “Monument to the Lost Things�

Excerpts from Community of Practice Diagram 2016

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How can process-driven design strategies of un-making and ethnography explore the symbolic capital of site?

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Mnemonic Objects

Collective remembering through the built environment.

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Rapid changes in modes of memory production since the industrial revolution have left in their wake an actively de-ritualised world within which trace and sign have become monumental. Through the collection of materialities we desperately cling to a slippery past manifesting as object, testimony, document, image - visible signs of what has been. The transformation of memory from embodied practice to collected archive has resulted in a fundamentally fragmented relationship with the past - memory is cast in the discontinuity of history as a collated representation about past states of affairs1.

Our awareness of this discontinuity is the key - memory has been deconstructed and is therefore anxious - as we become aware of the gaps between the fractured fragments. In this way, memory is intimately entwined with the practice of forgetting: Historical memory is aware of the gaps and cracks, and so the urge to archive cannot be extracted from our awareness of the slippery and subjective nature of memory. There would be no archival impulse without its parallel impetus to forget.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Remixing site stories: Spray Cans and Cornices “Assembly 1/Un-making 8” Plaster and Resin 2016 RIGHT: Hard Rubbish Collection Bundoora 2013 2016

This mass archival urge makes it impossible to predict what should be remembered - and our disinclination to destroy has resulted in a drastically materialistic orientation that frames our lives. The subjective archive is one in which all things are of value (of one kind or another), and all things have a role to play in the narratives of our lives.

T he proliferation of the archive is a hallmark of modernity. No longer the task of select cultural bodies, the

individual is now responsible for the creation and maintenance of their own archive, their own trace, their own history.

This obsession with materiality and trace - with the creation of individual archives, and the possession of identity defining objects is, according to Pierre Nora, a result of the swift acceleration of history, and the equally swift recession of modes of active memory production which until recently have provided a temporal grounding for both individuals and societies.1

As active agents in the production of history and the authoring of the archive, objects are powerful. They speak to us about history, society, nature, and culture, and they speak to us about ourselves. Objects are repositories of information and memory, able to spark experiences of nostalgia and connect us to specific places and times.

We surround ourselves with objects and define our lives through the accumulation of things. What we choose to keep, and what we choose to throw away - these are choices that publicly define self and community in a world that is obsessed with materiality and trace.

1 Pierre Nora. Between Memory and History: “Les Lieux De Mémoire”. Representations 26 (1989): 7.

1 Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever : A Freudian Impression.

Religion and Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

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The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future.

- Jacques Derrida

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B ill Brown in his essay “thing theory” writes that the “thingness of objects” becomes apparent “when they stop

working for us”, and that we “look through objects” to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture, most importantly about what they disclose about us, but we only ever catch a glimpse of the thingness of objects1. Any entity can be viewed as a thing or an object - it depends on how one is looking, but things, in contrast to objects, have more aura and more distance; they are constituted by human relationships with objects and are therefore imbued with memory. Objects become mnemonic things when they become part of a meaningful assemblage, when they have rubbed up against the human in a meaningful way2. The act of archiving draws out the thingness of an object through the construction of a narrative that is apparent, relate-able and meaningful.

A collection of objects accompanied a collection of memories and set in motion a process of inquiry which began with the act of collection.

1 Bill Brown. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1-22.

2 Alan Radley. “Artifacts, Memory and a Sense of the Past”.

In Collective Remembering: Inquiries in Social Construction, edited by David Middleton and Derek Edwards, 46-59. London: Sage Publications, 1990.

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Now integral to my design process - the accumulation and arrangement of pieces of material information allow me to weave together layers of understanding of site. Throughout all of my object and site based experiments, collection has become the first step of my process, as a collection of objects is also a collection of ideas, and is a way of framing reflections on space and inhabitation practice. Archives, as narrative, are composed of fragments of materialities that together comprise a picture of the past and give purpose to the future.

Working archivally has taken many forms within my projects and experiments, and has served a range of functions.

Collections of objects gathered in site, of sites as photographs, of writings and personal reflections: all serve as a means to map and communicate an idea about the passage of time and its specific relationship to a place and/ or person.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Nan’s Thimbles: Re-Framed “Collection 2” Pine, Winterstone, Nails 2016 THIS PAGE: What if? Collage Series “What if we choose to remember they?”

Paper, Glue and Ink 2016 13

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Ilection, s an object mnemonic before it becomes part of a color does place within a collection assign an object

The construction of presentation devices was intended to provide an organisational framework in order to influence the reception, reading and construction of meaning surrounding my thimble and casting collections. Influenced by the work of Spiros Pannigirakis, and the Edinborough Gardens Plinth Projects, the construction of custom made display mechanisms was intended to elevate and frame the collection, playing with the idea that the supporting and framing of an object is just as relevant to our understanding as the object itself. Secondary to the attempt to build a framing, supporting, exhibition device was the intention to play with the language of the domestic, and so by designing these devices as miniature structures, with features such as stumps and stud walls, I was trying to reconnect the structures and their contents to notions of domestic interior and personal inhabitation.

to the role of memory-keeper?

A single thimble sitting in the palm of my hand is open to scrutiny as a lone object. I can see its size, materiality, decoration. I can establish its function, I can see if it bears marks of wear and use.

RIGHT: Thimble Sites: Disintegration and Loss “Un-making 1” Porcelain and Resin Pine, Nails 2016

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A single thimble as part of a collection becomes a component of a greater whole that speaks to me about a person, about (an admittedly beige) passion for the object, about the urge to create a record.

Alone, it is at best a kitsch curiosity. As part of a collection, it’s value is FAR RIGHT: transformed.

Nan’s Thimbles: ReFramed This collection comes wrapped in “Collection 1” paper towel and safely housed in a Pine, Winterstone, Nails yellowing Tupperware container. It 2016 is fairly unimpressive. I wonder how a re-framing of this collection could impact its reception?

The display mechanisms allowed the individual items to be read as a collective, revealing relationships between the individual thimbles and their re-made cousins. The structures leaned a little too heavily on the language of the domestic, with the stud wall structure becoming quite a literal object, however the intention to frame and collate the objects was generally realised, the framing and presentation of the collection became integral to the communication of ideas of domestic narrative

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“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector`s passion borders on then chaos of memories.�

- Walter Benjamin

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How can process be memorialised?

A collection of thimbles creates a narrative about the collector - a collection of writings creates a new narrative about my interactions with the collection.

Writing has been a practice that I have engaged for most of my life, as a way to unpick and understand myself and the world around me. Exploring the notion that writing can operate as a design tool which augments visual and spatial methods, and a valuable addition to my own practice, I wanted to write the story of my thimble casting and collecting explorations in order to document additional dimensions of the process.

Inspired by Hanne Darboven’s systematic attempts to index life as it is lived, I set myself a series of observational questions to respond to as I materially experimented with the thimble collection: What is the date?

What is the time? What is the temperature? How Humid is it? What are my thoughts in this moment? This mode of documentation was an attempt to develop a concurrent personal narrative as a means to reveal interconnections between object, maker, and environment, as well as a way to reflexively engage with my process.

While undertaking this writing process I was considering the relationship between maker/designer, practice, and product, in a manner first learned in my anthropology study. The anthropologist, whilst being the other, is not outside the process of their own observations, but is directly influencing through their presence, the scenes which they observe. In a similar manner, the maker directly impacts their making through a range of physical and social practices. The process of collecting my stories simultaneous to my makings was an attempt to develop a reflexive archive of myself. The potential of this project could have been further realised by a larger scale documentation: The project was not completely successful as it was not extensive enough to provide a meaningful analysis of myself in process, although it did begin to shed light on personal working methods and my tendency toward impatience with material process. It was perhaps more successful as a personal journal than a public narrative.

When presented as a collection adjacent to the thimbles and the plaster casts I produced during this project, I could see the potential of the writing collection to form a secondary narrative connection object to maker in an active sense that is located more in the present than the past.

RIGHT: Date, Time, Temperature, Humidity, Thoughts “Site Writing1/Collection 2�

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Of particular interest to me were spontaneous memorial sites and “anti-memorials”, which materially function in a very different way to their more traditional siblings.

“Anti-memorials critique the illusion that the permanence of stone somehow guarantees the permanence of the idea it commemorates.”1 Instead it appears to me that the placement of the anti-memorial (i.e. flowers taped to a stop-sign) along with various signifying elements (such as a graffiti commemoration with the acronym R.I.P and a date) take the place of more permanent materials as signifiers of mnemonic import. In these cases the transitory nature of the anti-memorial is celebrated and defines the effect of the urge to remember.

LEFT: Shrine, Monument and Memorial “Collection 3” Photography 2016 FOLLOWING PAGE: Collection Collected “Collection 4” Brief 1 Presentation 2016 FOLLOWING PAGE: What if? Collage Series “What if interior is made of objects assembled?”

Paper, Glue and Ink 2016

Monuments and memorials can claim space both physically and symbolically. As sculptural objects that employ semiotics of material, form, scale and location, they author social and collective memory by commanding us to remember. As temporal installations their placement, arrangement, framing and impermanence become defining features of the call to remember, and in my experience, the fleeting nature of anti-memorials has a much more poignant effect - when I encounter the anti-memorial I encounter the memory of a person, where as the traditional memorial is separate from evocative ideas of temporal existence due to the solid, rigid permanence of their materiality. Classical monuments inhabit memory space in a hegemonic way, compelling the act of remembrance in a kind of rigid and dictatorial fashion which is increasingly unpopular. There is no doubt however that the memorial structures that inhabit our public environments define collective social memorial consciousness “Unitary forms do not reduce relationships. They order them.”2

How do we know if a thing is of mnemonic value?

Increasingly aware of the vast number of public monuments and memorials that exist within the built environment, I began to collect a record of the number and variety of these things as I encountered them on my daily rides around Melbourne’s northern suburbs. I hoped that through this process of collection and documentation I could deepen my understanding of the role and value mnemonic things claim within individual and social spaces.

The objects we are surrounded by are not inert, but act as sites of memory and history, materially and symbolically defining collective remembering and narrative. Collections of objects, through framing and curation, enable objects to become part of a greater narrative landscape which communicates ideas through the relationship between meaningful things. Active choices regarding materiality and the temporal nature of objects influences the way they communicate ideas. The act of collection is in itself a temporal one, and so the archive is a collection of time.

Through the act of collection I came to notice consistencies of material, scale and detail throughout most of the memorials - there was an overt preference for classical embellishment, and a tendency toward long lasting and durable materials such as stone and metal. Slightly larger than human scale seemed to be the trend for monumental structures, however shrines and headstones occupied smaller spaces. The strangeness and inaccessibility of these objects also stood out to me as a defining feature of their existence. Almost exclusively decorative in nature, these objects were most often found presiding over dedicated public spaces, and rarely served a function beyond simply being present.

Sue-Anne Ware, “Contemporary Anti‐memorials and National Identity in the Victorian Landscape.” Journal of Australian Studies 28, no. 81 (2004): 121.

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Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (Feb. 1966): 228.

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Un Making

Dialectics of presence and absence.

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T he interconnected nature of memory and forgetting, or to be more precise: The interconnected nature of modes of remembering and the potential of forgetting, was a concept that I needed to explore materially.

Thinking of memory and forgetting as presence and absence, with memory taking the form of made/generated “things”, with material form and inscribed value, and forgetting as absence, void, decay, disintegration, I embarked on a course of material exploration that engaged in the potential of removal and absence to become a powerful method of highlighting and augmenting presence.

Having established through collection and observation that the proliferation of the archive has fundamentally influenced the relationship between things and memory, and that the arrangement and framing of things is an integral part of the way they are received and “read”, I became interested in the potential of addition and removal to dictate new methods of representing memory-making and historical narrative.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Casting Blocks: Equal and opposite “Un-making 1” Plaster and Porcelain 2016

Mnemonic things such as shrines, memorials and monuments are dictations and commands to remember, but in an age when every person is a historian with their own subjective and viable archival footprint, what stories are remembered, and what are forgotten?

LEFT: What if? Collage Series “What if you took away all the walls but one?”

Paper, glue and Ink 2016

Rather than inducing us to remember the past, like the old monuments, can un-makings push us to forget the future? Instead of a command to remember the past, techniques of addition and removal place the past and the future in the objective present - in a stationary moment which can tell as story about the now and its relationship to the then.

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A cts of creation seem to exist in direct opposition to ideas of absence and void, where absence is inscribed

with symbolic meaning and often synonymous with the negative, with destruction and neglect.

As an innately creative practice, design traditionally functions to generate spatial propositions -it “manages forms of resistance to hegemonic structures of control”1 through the ordering and classification of space, and as such is very much oriented toward to generative practice.

So how can removal become a productive part of a generative practice?

Working through this paradox I engaged with a variety of material processes to explore dialectics of presence and absence. Gordon Matta-Clark’s practice of “discreet violations”2 which retained enough familiarity in his interventions to engender a sense of disorientation, became highly influential to my work. Over the course of the semester I have developed a making practice which focuses on undoing elements of site and re-making/un-making in order to strip familiar objects of their functional purpose and re-institute them as mnemonic things.

Making additions to site through the removal of functional spatial elements, either removing them entirely, or remaking them in forms and materials that strip them of their classic and expected functionality allows me to question the formal elements of built spaces, and re-think our relationships to familiar objects.

1 Phil Carney & Vincent Miller. “Vague Spaces” in A. Jansson and A. Lagerkvist (eds.) Strange Spaces: Explorations in Mediated Obscurity. Farnham: Ashgate Publications, 2009. p.9.

S>Stephen Walker. Gordon Matta-Clark : Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism. London. I.B. Tauris, 2009. p.13.

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LEFT: Remixing site stories: Doors on Doors “Assembly 2/ Un-making 6” 2016 Paper and flour-glue

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H ow does the process of remaking change the thingness of an object?

The act of un-making has taken many material forms over the course of the semester. Installing 1:1 scale printed doors in site (see previous page), collecting and remaking spray cans in plaster, using cutting techniques to un-make photographs, and experimenting with ice to un-make form. However the most important un-making I engaged in over the course of this semester, was the first.

Beginning with a single thimble, chosen for its clearly defined stipple pattern, I used plaster, resin and porcelain slip to create a series of casts and objects. The plaster was used to create negative casts of the space around the thimble, which I then filled with resin to create a positive of the negative space. This positive was then used to create another plaster cast and so on. Finally I poured porcelain slip into the series of dried plaster casts, allowing it to sit and dry for five minutes before pouring out again, resulting in a series of replicas which document the decaying surface of the thimble as the remaking process generated new surface and form conditions.

By the end of the investigation I had seven plaster casts, seven resin positives and seven porcelain re-makings. Assembled as a collection, these re-makings function as a time line, as the rapidly deteriorating surface conditions become evident. The edges of the thimble, initially clearly defined, quickly warped and flared, extending beyond the boundary of the plaster cast. The final thimble whilst resembling its original in form, was vastly different in surface condition and the warped edge resulted in objects which were lopsided and precariously balanced, with increased fragility. Observing the rapid surface changes piqued an interest in disintegration and decay in materiality as a way of engaging with ideas of loss, absence, impermanence and temporality, and emphasised the importance of materiality to my ongoing inquiries.

Through this process I came to view the plaster cast as an equal and opposite element to the thimble - a material host which bounds and defines the surface of the thimble remade. The plaster casts and their artifacts became an analogous tool for thinking about the relationship between memory and forgetting, allowing me to materially engage with the potential of the void as a way to illustrate absence and the familiar anxiousness of the forgotten, and developing my understanding of the potential of materiality to illustrate the tensions between absence and presence as felt states.

RIGHT: Thimble remade “Un-making 1�

Porcelain 2016

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Can removal be a generative act?

Rachel Whiteread gives substance to the void and endurance to the transitory. Casting negative space, she fills in the blanks and in doing so ABOVE: materialises the unconsidIn my parents house ered and unseen. In a similar “Un-making 4” fashion the wrapping work Paper and absence of Jeanne-Claude and Chris2016 to provides a means of materialising the presence of a ABOVE RIGHT : thing, whilst simultaneously In my parents house removing detail and re-in“Un-making 5” serting a new materiality that Paper and absence is in and of itself evocative.

2016 Working across several addition/removal projects concurrently, I began by appropriating techniques used by several artists whose work is relevant to my process, as a way of exploring techniques 31

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of addition and removal within the context of my own practice. Producing a series of anti-collages using photography taken of my parent’s house during the packing process, I used cutting as a technique taken from Gordon Matta-Clark’s practice as a very literal way of removing information from the frame. Not expecting this exercise to yield anything other than a superficial result, I was surprised to find that these quick explorations were and to my mind still are some of the more effective works that I have produced thus far. Such a simple act, however the objects removed become absent things with far more evocative power for their absence.

Far from being simply a lack of presence, absence is a felt condition -“we can literally see absences; in addition to representing objects, vision represents absences of objects”1 - and so realising this idea through removal becomes a powerful tool to communicate ideas of history and memory.

Anna Farennikova. Seeing Absence. Philosophical Studies 166, no. 3, 2013. p.430.

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C asting, cutting, collaging, adding, making inserting. A material focus on the relationship between addition and PREVIOUS PAGE LEFT: What if? Collage Series “What if a banister became a paintbrush?”

Paper, glue and Ink 2016 PREVIOUS PAGE RIGHT: Dematerialising Thimbles “Un-making 7” Ice 2016 RIGHT: In my parents house “Un-making 5” Paper and absence 2016

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While acts of removal are pure and supremely effective in their ability to evoke absence, I arrived at the conclusion that literal removal is only one way to engage with material ideas of presence and absence. Additionally, remaking, iteration and material transitions demonstrate temporal processes that illustrate the connections between present and past. Finally, un-making objects in order to extract their thingness, allowing for familiarity but stepping far enough away from the familiar to encourage strange encounters. These working methods hover on the edge of absence, not thoroughly committed to the void, but fluctuating between ideas of presence and absence.

removal on the one hand, and memory and forgetting on the other, allowed me to work through ideas and arrive at a personal position in relation to these concepts.

Initially challenged by the paradox of removing in order to add, I attempted to approach these ideas from a series of different vantage points based upon the practices of several influential precedents. Through this work I have begun to establish a relationship with absence that accommodates the process of creation.

These material experiments have allowed me to position my work not in the void, but on the edge of absence, concerned with the in between states - between memory and forgetting, between presence and absence, between making and destruction, between use and form. Remaking doors that cannot be opened, spray cans that cannot atomise, and thimbles that will not bear the pressure of a needle, I remake the objects, now devoid of function, in order to evoke their thingness.

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History

Place as author and narrative

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P laces act as both containers and authors of personal and collective narrative. Throughout my work this semes-

ABOVE: Brief 1 (case) “Collection 1” Found objects, cardboard, fabric 2016

ter I have experimented with various ways of constructing and communicating narrative, however two specific working modes - assembly and writing - have been particularly useful when thinking about site as author, and designer as author. Taking my process out of the studio and into site has asked me to consider the ways in which these narrative authoring methods can be translated into site specific works, and further, how/what these methods can contribute to wider contextual conversations.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Annotating a Bowser “Site Writing 4/ Strange Spaces 4” Sharpie in Situ 2016

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FOLLOWING PAGE LEFT: Under the Eastern “Site writing 2” 2016 FOLLOWING PAGE RIGHT: Somewhere in Thornbury “Site writing 3” 2016

C ontemporary practices of design anthropology emphasize a “bringing together or mutual exchange of tools, theories and methodologies”1 as a means of revealing richness located in-between disciplines. With this in mind, I have experimented with several modes of site specific “storytelling” in response to Jane Rendell’s practice of ‘site writing’, and Sue-Anne Ware’s research on anti-memorials, incorporating an anthropological approach to site into my personal practice.

Jane Rendell uses writing to explore the position of author in relation to theoretical ideas, objects and site, as well as to the site of writing itself. Thinking of writing as inherently spatial, Rendell’s approach to writing allows for a process of reflexivity to enter the work. This notion of reflexivity - of a simultaneous awareness of self in space and as a relative condition - is central to the practice of anthropology, as the individual always and in all ways has an impact on reading and response to site.

Taking the form of lists, descriptions, responses, measurements and observations, writing has allowed me to access parts of my process that were unexpected and surprising. In hindsight, as with the casting-writing exercises I undertook as part of my “Thimbles” project, the greatest value I have found in a concurrent writing and making practice is a way of observing my personal actions as fieldworker and designer, and a means to critically evaluate my working methods. Writing through process sheds light on preconceived ideas about space, assumptions, natural inclinations and native prejudices within my process, of which I would otherwise be unaware.

Writing ‘as site’2 while working into two void spaces, I remixed descriptive writing techniques, stream of consciousness observational styles, and annotative technical documentation. The somewhat stilted and frenetic result of this writing approach was by far the most successful of my writing attempts, providing a multi-layered artifact of my personal experience. Upon further readings I realize that it is possible to read these pieces not only horizontally on the page, but as a vertical stacking of spatial experiences. The dry and technically oriented detailing of materiality and measurement acts as a euclidean grounding; bursts of observation (like some form of spatial tourettes) are located in the immediate present tense and build a picture of the various ways in which the spaces are used; whereas florid adjective laden language belies my own romantic tenancies when perceiving site, as well as a predisposition to over-thinking my language.

Tau Ulv Lenskjold. “Accounts of a Critical Artifacts Approach to Design Anthropology”. Nordic Design Research Conference, Helsinki, 2011. p.2 2 Jane Rendell. Site Writing : The Architecture of Art Criticism. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010.

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Ichosen f this is what we choose to remember, what have we to forget?

LEFT: Under the Eastern “Shrines 1” Plaster and found objects 2016

Much of my research concerning public mnemonic structures and collective memory has engaged the idea of value: materiality and modes of assembly speak a symbolic language, implying a certain value system that is socially authored and authoring. The things that inhabit our lives tell stories about personal and collective identities, as do the things we choose to forget and throw away. Working in a way which reveals and reconstructs memory and history is a way for revealing and reconstructing mechanisms of value.

Working with Sue-Anne Ware’s research into anti-memorials, I constructed a series of shrines as material responses to site. The legacy of public mnemonic structures is the offering of official and legitimate versions of history, signed in stone and sealed with a plaque. Anti-memorials, in contrast, “offer an alternative reading [that] emphasises the informal and the local as opposed to the formal and the national”1.

Ware, Sue‐Anne. “Contemporary Anti‐memorials and National Identity in the Victorian Landscape.” Journal of Australian Studies 28, no. 81 (2004): p.121.

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LEFT: Somewhere in Thornbury “Shrines 2�

Plaster and found objects 2016

To Write

W orking through my established processes of collection and un-making, I cast and recast objects found in site - using both the positive and negative spaces offered by the objects themselves. Reassembling the collections of castings as shrines and re-inserting these assemblies in site, I attempted to use these memorial assemblies to tell stories about the invisible and unrecognised modes of inhabitation that these sites support.

The first memorial tells the story of a site which has been used alternately as dumping ground, play area and doss; the second a story of a site used as a canvas for graffiti artists, a social gathering place and an engineered storm-water run off.

The real trouble I ran into with these two shrine projects emerged with my re-insertion into site. The shrines, abstracted from their original objects, did not effectively communicate their connection to the sites themselves, other than being actively placed within them. I found that presenting the shrine assemblies during assessment presentations as sculptural objects had a more evocative effect, as the dissociation allowed for questions of provenance and an implication of origin. Taken out of context, the shrines became far more effective as narrative devices, and allowed site stories to evolve through the provocation of imaginative engagement.

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S ite writing and narrative making are two ways in which I have attempted to engage with site as a container and

LEFT: What if? Collage Series “What if the domestic is implied not realised?�

Paper, glue and Ink 2016

author of stories. My goal with these works has been to work towards a process which simultaneously acts as a form of research, revealing multiple modes of inhabitation and dwelling that sites encounter; and a form of storytelling, using the collection and reassembly of these observations to construct a narrative which recognises the value of a multi-layered approach to site.

A focus on the narrative potential open to me through site observation and design process seems to always return to the vagaries of memory and the unwanted, unloved and unrecognised modes of inhabitation that take place all around us. Modes of working which reveal these narrative threads have to this point taken the form of provocations and explorations rather than realized propositions. Much of my work has taken a critical slant - research projects into the status quo hand in hand with makings that attempt to challenge or disturb these modes. My interest in the negative spaces of casting, the things we choose to forget, the stories we don’t memorialise all stem from a firm belief that the undervalued things are more revealing about us - as individuals and as societies - than the things we hold dear.

The prioritisation of site narrative, united with anthropological modes of site work and site writing has enabled me to develop a practice which focuses on the collection and retelling of site as a collection of multiple valued narratives.

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Terrain Vague

In-betweens and the evocative potential of invisible places

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To Assemble

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C onnecting my un-making, collecting and writing practice to the built environment, I began to col-

PREVIOUS PAGE: Under the Eastern “Strange Spaces 1” Photography 2016

lect void spaces I encountered throughout the CBD and surrounding suburbs. Writing through the structural elements of these voids gave me insight into the conditions which rendered them so, or at least the conditions accompanying their voidness. Difficult to access, often dangerous to navigate, these void sites whether vacant lots, derelict industrial sites, or unkempt border areas, act variously as refuges, mirrors and memento mori. Residual and ambiguous, they allow us to examine ourselves and our everyday surroundings from outside the frenetic circuits of work, commerce, and transit.1 As counter-spaces, termed terrain vague by Man Ray and Ingnasi Sola morales, these sites are also containers of a fragmented shared history, illuminating the imperfect process of memory that constantly attempts to recall and reconstruct the past. Mutable and ephemeral, these sites are always in flux, often in suspension between former and future development, host to forms of marginality that are not always welcoming or welcomed. As active spatial in-betweens terrain vague become the stage for anarchist-archives that dispute and contest hegemonic spatial narratives. Considered within the context of Michel Foucault’s “heterotopias”, terrain vagues become “counter-sites” in which “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”2 Terrain vague, as a site orientation for my work, represents an assembly of the ideas I have worked through to this point, and a location for my work entering the second part of this project process.

Patrick Barron. Terrain Vague Interstices at the Edge of the Pale. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2008. p.2.

2 Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” in N.Leach and H. Frichot (eds.) Rethinking Architecture : A Reader in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1997. p.3.

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Place incarnates the experiences and aspirations of a people.

- Yi Fu Tuan

ABOVE: Vague Collections “Strange Spaces 2�

Photography 2016

D uring the 1970s Gordon Matta-Clark purchased and documented snippets of left-over space in Queens, New

York. Now known as the Fake-Estates project, this collection of terrain vague sites questions the legitimising role of architecture and planning in our perceptions of space.

Close observation and collection of similarly vague sites throughout Melbourne revealed the in-between nature of these sites. Always fenced off and inaccessible, they become invisible and inaccessible non-spaces - voids in the urban fabric.

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To Assemble

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To Assemble

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W orking into terrain vague has taken the form of a series of spatial experiments which attempt to unite the

LEFT: Victorian Temporary Fencing “Assembly 1” Pine fence palings, blue paint, masking tape 2016

methods and concepts I have developed over the course of this semester. An old Victorian terrace conversion that doubled as a petrol station, my chosen site for these experiments has a rich history: home to the Merhi family who lived in the terrace and ran the petrol station, dual narratives compete through material presences in-site.

Commercial detailing meets Victorian cornicing, temporary fencing straddles large way-finding arrows used to direct traffic in and out of the site. Now, with public access blocked, the site plays host to alternative and illicit narratives.

The politics of design are apparent in this site: gated and invisible until forces of legitimation can be unleashed and the site can be made ‘good’ again: Imposition of boundary and territory act as techniques which delegate site as terrain vague. Rearranging implied access to site using taped frames, and a domestic picket fence, I tried to redefine the territory of site, assembling ideas of commercial access and domestic inhabitation. Along with this spatial intervention I also re-made doors out of paper, spray cans as cornices and architecturally annotated a petrol bowser (see previous chapters). As an assembly of works, this project seeks to unite my design processes that have existed outside of site for the most part, and re-apply them to site as a way of testing process at a 1:1 scale.

Working in a way that begins to connect and intersect ideas that have been generated along parallel but autonomous lines to this point was a necessary step in my working process. Using framing techniques to extend boundaries of site as a means of reorienting attention toward an invisible place was a simple yet effective strategy. Observations of passers by responding to the intervention were interesting - in so far as there were responses. The site was a little less invisible for the time the installation was in-site, made a more prominent through the extrusion of vague space into public space.

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To Assemble

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S trange spaces, as forgotten sites within our urban fabric and social value systems, are sites of enormous poten-

BELOW What if? Collage Series “What if a window framed?”

Paper, glue and Ink 2016

tial. The temporal nature of these sites offers opportunities for tactical modes of inhabitation that are not ‘proper’ but are instead vibrant and creative uses of space. Terrain vague often stage alternative narratives and as such are perceived as lacking in value and symbolic capital. These are spaces of enormous potential that preference time and opportunity over sanction and legitimacy.

FOLLOWING PAGE: What if? Collage Series “What if the fence was not the boundary?”

Paper, glue and Ink 2016

My work into vague spaces, through active process driven installations, re-makings, writings and collages, seeks to scratch the surface of ‘vague’ as a designation, instead preferring ‘strange’ as a descriptor which recognises the legitimacy of difference. My work uses process to imagine new ways of engaging strange spaces in a way which accepts the political orientation of design practice as author of singular narratives, and instead proposes a design process which works into layers of complexity involved in the construction of site as strange - acknowledging the role of history and memory in our connection to place, acknowledging place as an ensemble of symbolic and functional materialities, usages and narratives.

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To Assemble

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ABOVE LEFT: Under the Eastern “Strange Spaces 3” Pine 2016 ABOVE RIGHT: Somewhere in Thornbury “Strange Spaces 4” Pine 2016

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Walls, fences, rivers, do not create a nowhere but a somewhere: that is, places that mediate.

- Georges Teyssot

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Epilogue Throughout this process, working through ideas of memory, history, presence, absence and strange spaces, I have been engaged in an internal dialogue that questions the role of my work within a design context. To this point I have been working in a mode that takes the form of concept and process driven installation, and is almost wholly preoccupied with temporal conditions of site and social/ symbolic readings. Concerned that my work has not been outcome oriented, I have questioned its value, assuming it to be lacking. Now, with the ability to reflect on my work as a collected body, I now realise that this assumption is fundamentally flawed. My work is geared toward an exploration of design as a critical process, and so outcomes are always secondary.

“What if the anthropologist through field studies can make information available and offer interpretations that addresses not only the different actors individually, but collectively, and thus intervene directly into the collective social reality by making differences apparent and perhaps conjuring up new possibilities”1 Working in-between disciplines, incorporating anthropological methods and modes of working has allowed me to reorient my design process as a critical practice rather than an outcome, and sets up the second part of this project to take the form of a series of testings, as I implement my process and evaluate the results.

Thinking about design as inherently political, involving the imposition of limits, order and form, I have defined a process that acknowledges and works into the spatial bias of design practice, that recognises past presents and places them on equal footing with contemporary strangeness as equally legitimate iterations of space.

Through practices of document collection, site specific research and the integration of domestic tropes in my collage, writing and remaking, I have attempted to engage the temporal and subjective nature of memory and place production through the overlay of histories and the counter-posing of present and past states.

Tau Ulv Lenskjold. “Accounts of a Critical Artifacts Approach to Design Anthropology”. Nordic Design Research Conference, Helsinki, 2011. p.2 59 1

Walter Benjamin describes the vanishing point of history as always being the present moment. Instead of disappearing somewhere behind us, history claims place in the present, and as a construction of the now, historical engagement involves a re-staging and reconstruction of the past. Thinking of the present moment as a point of confluence presents the potential for designer, as author of organising narratives, to activate imaginative and inventive ways of perceiving, conceiving of and taking part in everyday surroundings.

The process I have developed is geared toward revealing a way of reading site as a multi-layered stacking of spatial experiences. Excavating these layers allows for the apprehension of symbolic value systems that dictate our reception and treatment of site as object, and dictate the sites that we choose to remember and the sites we choose to forget.

Proposing a way of working in site research, my project tests the idea that symbolic capital, as a measure of spatial value, can be (to a degree) quantified, or at the very least qualified through the use of process-oriented working methods.

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Morris, Robert. “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (Feb. 1966): 223-235.

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Teyssot, Georges. A Topology of Thresholds. Home Cultures 2 no. 1, 2005.

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Ware, Sue‐Anne. “Contemporary Anti‐memorials and National Identity in the Victorian Landscape.” Journal of Australian Studies 28, no. 81 (2004): 121-33.

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Appendix

Hanne Darboven “Hommage an meinen Vater” 1989

Christo and Jeanne-Claude “Wrapped Fountain and Wrapped Medieval Tower” 1968 http://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/wrapped-fountain-and-wrapped-medieval-tower

Gordon Matta-Clark “Reality Properties: Fake Estates” 1973 https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/5210

Gordon Matta-Clark “Splitting” 1974 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1992.5067/

Spiros Pannigirakis “A Tentative Sign” Edinborough Gardens Plinth Projects 2013 http://spirospanigirakis.com/projects/a-tentative-sign/

Richard Serra “Verb List” 1967–68 http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2011/10/20/to-collect

Rachel Whiteread Five Early Works, 1988-1989 http://visualpreferences.tumblr.com/post/140496733360/rachel-whitereadfive-early-works-1988-1989

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