The Australian Institute of Architects has announced the creative team for Australia’s exhibition for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Anthony Coupe, Julian Worrall, Ali Gumillya Baker, Emily Paech and Sarah Rhodes were selected by the Institute’s Venice committee for their proposal “Unsettling Queenstown.”
The exhibition proposal explores ideas of decolonization and decarbonization, coupled with regeneration and revitalization, which responds to the overall theme for the Biennale set by curator Lesley Lokko, “Laboratory of the Future.”
Taking the example of Queenstown in Tasmania, emblematic of a settler town “built on resource extraction and labour exploitation”, the exhibition ponders the post-colonial future of this town and similar examples around the world.
Australia’s pavilion at the Giardini will be transformed into an immersive experience with a floating “ghost” in Tasmania’s colonial history.
“Queenstowns are real places but they don’t even have proper names. They are just outreaches of the monarchy and colonialism,” explained Anthony Coupe.
“They are resource driven places and some of them are collapsing – the resources have run out and you’ve got communities that don’t know what to do with these towns,” he continued.
“Particularly at the end of this second Elizabethan age, it’s cast a whole spotlight on the monarchy and what it does and what the legacy is for Australia.
“The whole of Europe is based on the low labour rates of colonial outposts. These are the global issues that we like to think about. We also like to think about how they play out at a local level.”
The exhibition will comprise four elements centred around an “ethereal and uncanny” replica of the arched belvedere of the colonial Empire Hotel in Queenstown, which will be reconstructed in woven mesh and will float above the floor of the Australian Pavilion.
“We’re unsettling Queenstown by chopping it off at the foundations, so to speak,” Coupe said.
The creative team will also seek oral histories from First Nations peoples and Queenstown residents whose voices will play through the ghost of the Empire Hotel.
“We’re very much interested in this area around temporality and narrative. So to some degree it’s about understanding that past in a different way and rethinking its history so that there’s possible different futures,” Coupe said.
On the floor will be the a layered map of Queenstown “with streets, buildings, and mining infrastructure inscribed on the underlying landform with its topography, waterways, and vegetation, overlaid with an abstract net of property boundaries, cadastral grids and survey points.” Aboriginal place names will be projected onto this ground layer.
On the walls will be projections of landscape photography of Country as it has changed over time, and an “open archive” of “exemplars and techniques from contemporary architectural practice, assembled in response to a call and response, gathered and interpreted by the Creative Directors.”
Coupe explained, “What we’re trying to do is invest ourselves and Australian architects in a conversation around what decolonisation might mean in architecture.
“Our callout, our survey of work is focused on tactics rather than exemplar projects. This is our ‘laboratory of the future’ to some degree. It’s a conversation.
“We’re calling out for projects that deal with ideas of incorporating First Nations knowledge, that provide listening and dialogue, that make spaces that are inclusive, that connect with time, memory and experience, and incorporate processes to enable change. As we do this we uncover what the tactics are and this can inform a framework.”
Source: Architecture - architectureau
