May 7, 2011
Ross Gibson in “Places past Disappearance” in Transformations 13-1 (2006) says that rummaging in Australia’s aftermath cultures he tries to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies:
My job is to investigate and recuperate scenes and collections of artifacts that have been torn apart somehow, torn by landgrabbing, let’s say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration. Typically, the scenes and systems I investigate were once a good deal more coherent, but now they are ailing or out of balance. I’ve come to understand that most of Australia is like this, that the place we inhabit is our best evidence about our unbalanced selves and that this place has so much raggedness in it because it is patterned to the society that has used it so roughly.
It’s an attempt to chant some patterned significance back into places that have long been denied custodial care. It’s the first step in imagining how a new, relatively cohesive present might evolve from adjustments and activations of vestiges from the past.
He adds:
Our Australian part of the world is strewn with vestiges of cultural and natural systems. Consider the vulnerable skeins of indigenous dreamings; the remnants of endemic ecologies; consider also the myriad systems of work and belief that have been refined elsewhere in the world and partially transplanted here. The good news is that in some cases, despite two hundred years of colonial disturbance, we have managed to avoid terminal damage, either by getting out of the way of resurgent nature or by applying design and labour attentively and adaptively. But in many instances our places are teetering with a minimal degree of systematic cohesion, and they will be made sensible only if we act promptly and boldly, so that our aesthetic and civic patterns might help us project our thinking across everything that’s missing or ailing.
It's a process of uncovering fragments that you know have been discarded by the world.
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