Australia and its architecture tend to transplant ideas of place, form, and seasonality from afar, privileging a Western worldview. This tactic starts to learn place by collecting minute-long video recordings, capturing movement and sound; light interacting with the landscape; glittering spiders’ webs in the sun; breezes over native grasses. They become an archive, reflecting seasonal temporality and recording what actually occurs here across the year, to understand local micro-ecologies, to preserve a memory of Here, before it sustains radical change as our planet warms.

The videos are provocations – where exactly are you standing, gazing, all senses alive, for this minute? Whose traditional lands do you stand on? By what names were it known? What knowledge is embedded in this landscape? What were its cyclical, interconnected constructs? Each piece locates spatial coordinates; time and date stamps – Cartesian markers acting as portals to alternate perspectives. They demand questions that start to reveal both pre-settler experiences as well as the effects of colonisation on First Nations peoples. The act of researching an original place name reveals truth-telling and engenders relationships.

heliotope.com/Learning-Country-Archive