"Il faut se donner un but impossible."
Valery a Gide.

Taking Down the Fences

Keith Bradby: And what next for us was to work with the farmers on the origins of the Landcare movement, work with the ecologists and the concerned members of the community on the biological values of this place and what it needs, and I'll be honest, that after 15 years of that, I think we'd achieved a lot, but nowhere near as much as we need to achieve. So we start searching for what is the next big lift that this landscape and society needs. And it is being able to think across a thousand or two kilometres and across a thousand or two years, to what is health in this landscape, what is vitality in this landscape. And it's a lot more than looking after rare species or propping up farms with a few belts of trees. It is stitching the health back together and it is bringing it, and its values and its needs into our culture. Gondwanalink is the vehicle that we think helps us do that here, and helps us appreciate both the need and the ability to do that nationally.

from the transcript to the radio program, Taking Down the Fences.


This image from http://www.gondwanalink.org/


A great show for encounter on ABC Radio National.
Gondwanalink, as most Albany people know, is an amazing programme to regrow a strip from Kalgoorlie to Margaret river, the brainchild of Keith Bradby.

What excites me about it is that taking down fences and reclaiming farm land demands a rethink of entire social, cultural and community systems. And it proposes using nature as the infrastrucure through which human interaction with the land is controlled.

Keith Bradby: ... Again, at the risk of sounding either arrogant or facetious or some other rude word, we have formally apologised as a nation to the Aboriginal people of Australia for shall we say both our mistakes and our intentional wrongs. And I don't think we have yet formally apologised to the country as a whole for our clumsiness and our mistakes and our intentional damage. And I think when you work on something like Gondwanalink and you say 'Look, over 1,000 kilometres we've ripped it asunder and broken the essential links', at some point you do have to apologise to the land or at least do those things which help atone for those wrongs.

Stretch

While me and Yoshi were wandering around the soccer pitch this morning, the only place that allows for something approaching mindless wandering in my immediate neighbourhood, I caught myself stretching the grass outside the fences and up to the neighbours' front doors, and thinking - well, why is there a road there? The grass should keep going, and the cars could drive on the grass. (And so on) And I realised that's what I do: see a site, and apply a solution. It's what drove many of my projects: the water in the laneway was an opportunity to plant something, the void under the park in projekt square got me thinking about storing storm water there, the grass on the edge of the railway lines makes me think of herds of cows. Sand blowing up and making hills at Middleton Beach makes me wonder how to us the process to build a useful new land form. It's how I think. Is it how all designers think?

THE NOT-SO-RADICAL CENTRE

extracts from

PRACTICE REVIEW

In reviewing a landscape practice, the statements of the practitioners can be used to measure their practice against the evidence that they themselves give of their work.

...Temporality: a nice idea, a seductive idea. It’s seduced a lot more landscape architects than these two[1].

In a landscape context the use of plants makes it a given – what grows, decays: implicit change over time… temporality is also a claim set against notions of fixity, the building, the white gallery space and the museum all fitting this category when the category was named[2]; the pot, the garden bed and the street curb are their landscape architecture cousins. “The Garden in Movement interprets and develops the energies found in the place...its name refers to the physical movement of plant species on the land, which the gardener interprets in his own way. Flowers grown [sic] in the middle of a path oblige the gardener to choose: should he conserve the passage or the flowers? …The design of the garden, which constantly changes, is the result of the work of the person who maintains it, not an idea developed on the drawing board.”[3] In this context, unmediated use of hard materials is a practice against temporality: sure they break down, but everything breaks down eventually. In the words of a master of change, “Everything passes/Everything changes/Just do what you think you should do.”[4] To respect the claim we would therefore ask what is the time frame referred to, what do you mean by change, who/what are the agents of change? How does the stone wall of the emergency services memorial “unfold like a blanket”? Unfortunately, these questions remain unanswered.

How close do the two sides of the triangle come together?

…if they are not close enough, then there are a number of options. You can change the story or be better at the practice. Perhaps that is about being brave. To claim a radical practice requires that I check my success against the claims I make with clear and transparent processes, if not to the world at least to myself.

---

[1] A project that has engaged with it in a real way, I would say, is Section 8. This project was a short-term act, that because of its success as a space remains, and the ‘built’ form that was otherwise (supposedly) destined for the site has been either canned or indefinitely postponed. It remains in place because it is interesting. Apparently when it ceases to be interesting it will cease to be. There are many others, like Sue-Anne Ware’s road side memorials, Act Two, and many I just can’t think of right now.

[2] There should be a reference here, but sorry, I haven’t got one. My guess is that it rose up with land art, systems art, performance etc in postformalist late 1950s/early 1960s, along with the break out of art from the white gallery space.

[3] Gilles Clément quoted on p13, Alessandro Rocca (Ed.), 2007, Planetary Garden – the Landscape Architecture of Gilles Clément. Birkhäuser. Basel, Boston Berlin, Broome.

[4] Bob Dylan, To Ramona. Copyright ©1964; renewed 1992 Special Rider Music

sustain 7

a collection point for ideas, processes, plans and actions to create a sustainable community in the south west of west australia, with an underlying principle that what we do will make a positive contribution to place in the year 2220: seven generations in the future.

A line made by walking.

"...he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line."

Richard Long

A Line Made by Walking 1967

Photograph and pencil on board


Hearing about Richard Long's Line was one of the first things that made me realize I was a sculptor. Such banal everyday practice was what people were calling art? Then ok, I am an artist! This guy, and all those British land artists like him, Hamish Fulton, Ian Hamilton Finlay etc, were so influential on my gentle practice, and what I love.

Pick a daisy, one for each day of your life (this makes an empty green spiral in a field of yellow cape weed daisies, and your hands are sticky with yellow pollen and white sap)

So how come this didn't come out in four years of design exploration studies? It is a gentle, subtle thing, and I never felt like being a design student was either gentle or subtle. Even the word designer sounds hard to me, smooth, grey and perfect... none of those things is me. I like the process of designing, but don't want to be one. I'd much rather be a sculptor, rough hands, moving clay around and hammering chunks of wood. Or a land artist, walking in the dewy grass. Walking in circles.
And what has happened to my sculpture practice? Ah, now that is a long secret... some stupid idea about not documenting stuff. But if you can't show it to someone, maybe they don't believe you did it. So just occasionally you feel like maybe you didn't do it. And sometimes that thought spills too far, and you just stop talking about it, and then you stop doing it all together.
And do you stop loving it, too?

Quote and photo from the Tate Modern website: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=8971, Accessed 21st August 2009

the Arithmatic of the Suburbs

But examples of sustainable gardening in suburban situations are of limited value. In the arithmetic of the suburbs, where each positive sits between two negatives, opposite at least one negative and within an infrastructure of negatives, the net gain is never greater than zero. What is of greater importance is to change the infrastructural numeric.