Mountainous and isolated, so-called ‘Queenstown’ is
a wild, uncompromising place. Forged by the violence
of extraction, the town’s history is imprinted in the landscape as both residue and rupture. Exploring these entangled forces, we engage listening as a creative tactic to expose the complexities of ‘Queenstown’ and its hidden material bodies.
Architectural labour is by its very nature dis-embodied: removed from the sites in which material production, construction and destruction take place. Through the architectural drawing, life worlds are reconstructed as future commodities. Instead, we propose listening as a form of in-action and being-with. Listening can attune us to voices, bodies, and materials both present and critically absent – including the historic loss of palawa culture and language. Here, listening and the score itself are conceptualised as a form of disobedience, of non- productivity – undermining the irrationality of endless growth and extraction.

public-office.info