2022
The Podium of
Remnant Revival
“More than just the museum, the site comes to encompass a relay
of several interrelated but different spaces and economies”
One Place After Another - Miwon Kwon
This project delves into the concept of site-specific installations and artwork, with a focus on the historical dimensions of ACCA in South Bank. The project aims to rekindle awareness of pre-colonial ecology, bringing the river’s vitality to life by harmonizing industrial and natural ecosystems.
- Provocation A uncovers the site’s industrial era history, showcasing its layered past.
- Provocation B seeks to honour the pre-colonial heritage of South Bank, previously a swampland prior to European settlement. The resulting design features a pavilion with scaffolding infrastructure, stairs, and platforms hosting planter boxes of Indigenous plants, cultivated by artists and Indigenous practitioners.
- Provocation C relocates the pavilion to Batman Park, Melbourne, adapting it to facilitate the growth of aquatic Indigenous plants that disperse native flora via the river’s network over time.
In Provocation C, we are relocating to a new site at Batman Park, a small open grassed space with paths and planted Eucalyptus trees. The site was originally part of extensive riverside wetlands of the Wurundjeri nation’s territory prior to European settlement. After settlement the area was used as a dumping ground for waste and discharge for sewerage and stormwater, destroying the wetlands and turning the site from diverse riverside wetlands to smelly muddy swampland.
In this project, I shifted the strategy in the connection to the river.
Continuing on the research about Indigenous agriculture and aquaculture, I realise the significant roles the river and water played in Aboriginal culture. In this project, I focused my research about wetland to Aquatic plants that grow at the river bank, underwater and float.
My precedents who work on water based projects and scaffolding structure including Little Island,Christo and Jeanne Claude’s The Floating Piers and FAV Pavilions. It is important that in the Little Island project, the infrastructure of these poles create a breeding and protection habitat for marine life, as well as planting indigenous trees and plants which contribute to the biodiversity of the city.
My design for Provocation C aims:
- to revive the pre-colonial ecology acknowledgment, inhabiting and activating life force of the river through a designed interplay between industrial and natural ecosystem.
- to become the catalyst to magnify and inhabit relationality.
The final design includes 2 parts:
- Scaffolding modules connected on a horizontal plane, located on top of the rivers with a based piers columns connected to the river bed.
- Floating piers for Aquatic plants that are detachable and can travel along the Yarra River towards the oceans or back to the upper part of the Yarra River.