2024 Spring Seminar VIS 2468
Instructor: Rosalea Monacella
Collaboration with: Eva Li
“I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!”
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!”
-My Country, Dorothea Mackellar
In the cultural mind, sandstone is invisible, minuscule, and “normal”. Sydney is founded and excavated in sandstone. (McNally, 2000) The Sydney area is where the British colonization of Australia began and the Sydney people bore the brunt of the initial invasion.
Through a forensic and intentional application of sandstone to criticize the colonial system, patterns, and structure, the project demonstrates the result of such social construction and how cultural narratives become ingrained in the society that has engendered appropriation, dispossession, and racism. It then imagines a future in between dissolving perpetuity, decolonization, and revealing the invisible geology that shapes Australian identities.
The project breaks down into cultural narratives of sandstone by criticizing colonial lenses, geopolitics and constructs of dispossession and damage, then examines cultural implications of such colonial constitution through bodies of knowledge and an act of extraction.
Through a forensic and intentional application of sandstone to criticize the colonial system, patterns, and structure, the project demonstrates the result of such social construction and how cultural narratives become ingrained in the society that has engendered appropriation, dispossession, and racism. It then imagines a future in between dissolving perpetuity, decolonization, and revealing the invisible geology that shapes Australian identities.
The project breaks down into cultural narratives of sandstone by criticizing colonial lenses, geopolitics and constructs of dispossession and damage, then examines cultural implications of such colonial constitution through bodies of knowledge and an act of extraction.