Minimal Intervention

RMIT Lower Pool Studio S1 2023

Momento Mori is a small winery on Boon Wurrung Country, south-east of Melbourne CBD. The studio site includes its two properties in the hills of West Gippsland. Until the nineteenth century, the vineyards were separated by the Great Swamp, an important place for the Boon Wurrung language group. From 1870, pioneering colonisers drained, cleared and subdivided the area for farming, infrastructure, and housing. The vineyards, this bare, altered, and degraded ecosystem and its surrounds forms the studio’s area of focus.

In a context of fire, flood, a result of our climate crisis and degraded landscapes, Momento Mori follow principles of minimal intervention winemaking; little is added or taken away. The goal is to capture the ‘terroir’, a term used to describe the effects of climate, geography, topography, soils and tradition on the grapes flavour. In this studio we will ask: How can a concept of terroir be rethought in the local context of decolonisation? What version of site do we seek to capture? And through which cultural perspective is it to be perceived? How can we begin to repair the cultural and ecological damaged caused by colonial agricultural practice?

In dialogue with Momento Mori and drawing upon this minimal approach, students will propose for a series of interventions into the site’s existing ecological, geological, atmospheric, built and cultural conditions. Students will design systems, spaces and structures to facilitate viticulture and winemaking activities while unpacking the inherent tensions in farming European monocultures on unceded Boon Wurrung country. As such, each student will be asked to reconsider their site extent and redefine the area for intervention, exceeding colonial binaries such as public & private land ownership, natural & manmade, and architecture & landscape.

By Collective Territories

Led by Joseph Gauci-Seddon w/ Dane Johns (Momento Mori)

+ Other guests

Mon + Thur. 2:30-5:30pm

We will visit site multiple times during the semester (full day). Transport arranged by students