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Mine Land, My Land

Part 2 Project 2022
Paris Fenton Gazzola
Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) | UK
My Land, Mine Land, is an investigation into gold-mining towns in the Western Australian desert. The project creates a conversation between two societies, Indigenous and non- indigenous who occupy the same land yet have contrasting relationships with it, resulting in profoundly different, often divergent ontologies and ecological consequences.
Australia’s spatial organisation and land use are geared towards impetuous colonial- capitalist regimes of power, appropriation, and accumulation. This imported colonial knowledge and mentality has hindered Australia’s ability to peacefully inhabit the land, ultimately resulting in its destruction.

Despite the differences between Indigenous and western communities, the one factor that unites them is the land and more importantly, how to survive a land in constant peril. The project repositions our relationship with the land as a fundamental driver for change, in the hope to remediate the land and repair relationships.

Aboriginals developed sustainable land management practices over sixty-thousand years, yet they have been silenced. This wisdom is invaluable. The project excavates suppressed indigenous knowledge to reimagine desert living based on local resources, remediation, and co-existence.

The proposed settlement of ‘Leonora’ is composed of an archipelago of residential islands on the surface which extend into social, commercial, and industrial spaces underground. Rather than designing a building as an object, there is a paradigm shift towards designing systems that are inspired by the surrounding flora and fauna. Methods of computational design, time-based media, and mythology shape a provocative spatial re-imagining.

Paris Fenton Gazzola

Tutor(s)
Dr Penelope Haralambidou
Michael Tite
2022
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