The visual language and conceptual articulations of this tactic resonate strongly with the Biennale’s overall themes. Site Geist II offers a transdisciplinary reading of relationality as a tactic that potentially yields correspondingly rich architectural manifestations.

Site Geist II prioritises sustained close relationship with site by mapping imagined choreography onto walls of settler buildings using string and dowel. The architect adopts a relational approach by looking for places of instigation from the wall ‘itself’, negotiating ever-changing encounters between constructed artefacts and materials, evoking an archeological dig. The insertion of dowel into extant crevices, avoiding imposition, engenders linework that dances over the wall. These ‘constellations’ of point and line to plane are ephemeral in both appearance and construction.

Site Geist II is part of a larger investigation that faces troubled histories and uncertain futures, unsettling notions of settlement. By opening new terrains of performance and building, we’re asking what shared sovereignty – in the broadest sense; with landscape, bodies, constructed artefacts and multiple species – might look like.

paulwakelamarchitect.com/topography-dance

greatsoutherndance.com.au