Plotting and gleaning a restless site

A landscape protagonist, a (mostly) self-guided tour, a collection.

Here, at this junction, it’s all in motion.

It’s where a river meets a bay, where the very matter of the ground is volatile, slipping from beneath you as you walk beside the path. So much so, that the sensation of walking this ground is akin to standing at a shoreline with waves hollowing out the beach from under you, forcing you to regain your footing over and over. Walking is really just controlled falling, and here – where the land is not solid but comprised of restless granules – you must traverse in stuttering steps and lurches.

This performance/installation/tour introduces you to a landscape protagonist and a spatial practice founded on collection, narrative, walking and making. It examines and explores a landscape, which itself is restless and mobile. It emerges from a broader body of design research that frames landscape as an inherently performative medium – temporally intermediate, in between states, unfinished and ‘unfinishable’.

The material for this performance-presentation has been generated from a long-term fascination with the landscape within and around Truganina Explosives Reserve in Altona, Victoria, and the mobility of its matter. Here, the ground itself is restless; volatile and mobile. The site and surrounding context is relentlessly flat and exposed, and the 2.5m high fence spanning the large decommissioned reserve is a powerful presence. The context of the site – its horizontality, exposure, and the mobility of its matter – reveals the implausibility of sustaining a fixed bound condition within this landscape. This is a place where drift is writ large, it is vast and flat and on the move.

  • Plotting and gleaning a restless site, Performing Mobilities, 2015.

  • Plotting and gleaning a restless site, Performing Mobilities, 2015.

  • Plotting and gleaning a restless site, Performing Mobilities, 2015.

  • Plotting and gleaning a restless site, Performing Mobilities, 2015.