Ruins of Repair

This project seeks to explore how architecture and its eventual ruin, can serve to help reconcile, visualise and recontextualise the relationship we have with extractive landscapes in a bid to decolonise our attitude to the lands we occupy. Reconfiguring the infrastructure of a former gold mine, this project reverses the mine by extracting waste from the adjacent town to enable the sites repair, resulting in a a new kind of ruin – not one that fetishises decay or that fakes repair, but one that holds the scar of the former extraction site open while imbuing it with new life

It evidenced in the walls of this room, the chairs that we sit on, and the clothes that we wear, yet it lies forever just beyond the horizon line, just past the field of view, perpetually obscured. The reality of our appetite for cheap, fast and expendable consumables is evidenced by the 732sqkm of open extraction sites across the state. Despite the scale, these landscapes, weaponised at the behest of growth, are seldom seen, kept from view by a convenient tree line, a man-made hill, or an imposing fence line. Taking up residence on the grounds of an active gold mine, this project interrogates the consequence of material choices on people, landscapes and ecosystems and recontextualises the role these turbid and contested territories have in our collective memory. In drawing these sites into the field of vision, these scarred landscapes give critical purchase to contend with the reality our material and ideological anthropocentrism. It is in the reinvention and recovery of these sites that my project aims to provide the substrate from which reckoning, healing and recognition to occur, giving rise for scar tissue to form where open wounds currently lay.