Re-covering Country

(on Kevin O’Brien’s Finding Country project)

"Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere"[1]

Kevin O’Brien is at pains to clarify: the Finding Country project is not concerned with recuperating a pre-invasion Paradisiacal setting, framed by familiar ab-originary idealizations of human-being – by turns sentimentalizing and nostalgic; or geared to some kind of vague compensatory atonement for the sins of imperialist and colonialist designs, c1788. Atonement - `at-one-ment’: might this characteristic undertow of modernity represent an irremediable longing for authenticity that veils a deeper haunting, an intractable prohibition?    

At their core, the contention, challenge and implications of Finding Country are not historical, moral or aesthetic, but militant and political. O’Brien’s simple yet troubling proposition is to have 50% of an urban fabric erased in one event. The means are unspecified - if not beside the point; and left entirely to the judgment and predilections of participating cartographers. But is the process one of mapping, of design or indeed of both? Presented with this challenge, what will be erased, how and to what ends? As Sandra Kaji-O’Grady has acutely put it:

“At this point everything is in question. On what basis does one remove half the city? Is it to reveal the important sites of previous occupation? Is it to enable new (or old) ways of living? Might erasure be predicated on an outside force, say fire or economic depression, rather than the will of the architect? What is clear is that Finding Country is anathema to the productive role architecture currently plays for the capitalist economy. It contradicts the call to build that is the architect’s modus operandi. Perhaps this is the ultimate tension that motivates O’Brien’s practice and academic engagement – the antagonism that exists between the erasure and discernment of Finding Country, and the additions to the city through construction.”[2]

Over several iterations of the project at the University of Sydney, students have encountered these questions, so intrinsic to the challenge; and rehearsed many of their premises and implications. What to erase, why; how to erase, why; how might erasure constitute a form of design; in what way might practices of subtraction or retraction in some ways amplify or magnify a place; how does loosing half a city constitute finding (a) country; how is it that urban erasure – a form of (forced) forgetting – can unclench a process of recollection and remembrance, if not recuperation; and, if Finding Country does not aim to recuperate a past but to project future, in what sense(s) should the `re-' of re-cuperation, re-collection and re-membrance be taken?

The means have varied – from rising sea levels that flood valleys and gullies, to bushfires that scar slopes and ridges. There is always studious (though regretfully schematic) attention to the science – the behavior of bushfires in relation to topography, geology, hydrology, seasonal and microclimatic variations; the patterns of sound waves through air of different pressure, moisture, thermal conditions and so forth. In 2015, a more consistent `elemental’ framing of the project, by a vigorously diverse student group from Architecture, Heritage and Conservation and Sydney College of the Arts programs, settled on five destructive parameters based on Western thinking about the five Elements and their correspondence to the five Senses: air/wind (touch), water (taste), fire (sight), earth (smell) and sound/aether (hearing). But the group had to equally heed O’Brien’s warning: the means of erasure should not (necessarily) be thought of as a catastrophe – tornado, tsunami, bushfire, earthquake, sonic warfare. Nevertheless, they might be though of in terms of the `disaster’, in the unusual sense that Blanchot gives it:

“The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; ‘I’ am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me – an other than I who passively become other. There is no reaching the disaster. Out of reach is he whom it threatens, whether from afar or close up, it is impossible to say; the infiniteness of the threat has in some way broken every limit. We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future – that which is yet to come – if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.

The disaster is separate; that which is most separate.

When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come. The disaster is its immanence, but since the future, as we conceive of it in the order of lived time, belongs to the disaster, the disaster has always already withdrawn or dissuaded it; there is no future for the disaster, just as there is no time of space for its accomplishment.”[3]

Unusual because for Blanchot the disaster does not effectively destroy but spares; which is to say that it saves, keeps in reserve or potentializes. This is why “the disaster is the gift”, the “advent of what does not happen, of what would come without arriving.”[4] Unusual, too, because of its ambiguity with respect to time; to the temporality of existence as much as the temporality of design: with the disaster, we are always under the threat of what has already passed, what has already taken place.

Hence the catastrophic events that our cartographer/designers apply to the city activate several functions. Erasure potentializes (preserves, sustains) the site in the same way that indigenous practices of controlled burning (or, to use the unfortunate, quaint phrase `fire stick farming’)[5] potentializes the earth – in other words, renders it productive or fructifies it; an undertaking that must be regarded as simultaneously ecological, sociocultural and symbolic. Potentializing the site renders it receptive to a kind of becoming-Country that had been denied it since invasion. Potentializing the site also functions to resist or contest the radically futural predilections and accumulative perspectives of global capital.

The question then is not to recollect a past, more or less idealized, but to imagine a future, more or less unknown if not unknowable; and to do so not by projecting defined urban solutions, but by looking into the emergent prospects enabled by the gaps, interstices, vacancies, streaks, scars and smudges of erasure. The re- of recuperation and recollection now parallel the re- of revealing. Finding Country is ostensibly about recovering what has been lost or hidden by successive accretions and sedimentations of the city. But to recover, to reveal also means to cover-again, to veil-again - literally to `fold-(into)-once-more.’[6] Finding Country is not about `discovering’ or `uncovering.’ It is not about clarity or evacuation (yet another manifestation of terra nullius or tabula rasa). Rather - and as fundamentally a design rather than cartographic undertaking - it preserves for itself much more discomfiting prospects: that design is as much about withholding as it is about releasing; as much about articulating restraint and resistance than about  yielding and surrender (or `communication’, or `expression’). There follows significant implications for an entire technics of design in which concealment and occlusion must play a pivotal role.

Notes

[1] Samuel Beckett, letter to Nancy Cunard, 1959, in Fintan O'Toole, `Beckett in love', The New York Review of Books, April 2, 2015: 54.

[2] Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, `Kevin O’Brien Architects’ in Architecture Australia, July 2014, available at http://architectureau.com/articles/kevin-obrien-architects/ accessed 1 April 2015.

[3] Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995: 1-2.

[4] Blanchot, Disaster: 5.

[5] See Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: how Aborigines made Australia. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2011.

[6] See Giorgio Agamben. Nudities. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010: 55-103.