Echoes of Empire

The Southern Pacific Rim is among the most vulnerable regions to climate change. Extreme and unpredictable weather conditions, prolonged periods of drought, and intensified bushfire events, alongside the warming and acidification of oceans, continue to increase the vulnerability of both human and non-human communities. The relentless pursuit of economic growth propelled an ever-expanding demand for the extraction of natural resources, erasing, shaping, and altering cultures while transforming landscapes. Through the pursuit of power over resources, environments, and people iodiversity zones have been devastated, communities displaced, and profound racial, social, and economic disparities have emerged. These are issues inherently intertwined with environmental changes that produce a ‘climate colonialism’. Extractive practices have caused ecological damage, perpetuated systemic inequalities, and power imbalances that disproportionately affect marginalised communities that generates perpetual zones of sacrificed landscapes.

This studio redefines the delineated resource grounds, infrastructures, waste byproducts, and atmospheric territories as a ‘thickened ground’ condition encompassing interconnected ‘non-scalable’ processes and flows. The ‘thickened ground’ will be explored as alternative ontologies in which processes do not segregate substance from significance nor nature from culture. The studio will critically re-narrate the enduring material flows and metabolic transformations that have taken place in this region to exploit the evolving perceptions and values attributed to land and its non-human counterparts and propose alternative narratives, institutional regimes, and new legacies.

Commonwealth nations in the region share interconnected histories characterised by the British Empire’s building of power through their resource exploitation, indigenous displacement, migrant labour, and large-scale extractive practices. These commonalities present opportunities for the design of projected future scenarios that seek alternatives to historical regimes of expansion and exploitation and ones that resist and dismantle colonial regimes and systems of perpetual growth. This is timely given the increasing climate impacts, growing recognition of Indigenous land rights, emerging international environmental protection frameworks, and Commonwealth legal and institutional frameworks that can facilitate coordinated action.

The Galilee Basin in Australia is the site of the study. It encompasses the Abbot Point coal terminal, the Great Barrier Reef, coal mines, freight lines and the broader Galilee Basin (248,000 km2, approximately equal to the United Kingdom), which covers one-sixth of the Australian continent. The design approach aims to generate a detailed understanding of how colonial resource extraction has shaped these territories. The projects will explore alternative infrastructural territories along a transect from the Great Barrier Reef to the coal mines deep in the Galilee Basin. Designs will embrace techno-ecological relationships within a framework of territorial commons, addressing legacies of power, labour and productivity, land recognition, and toxicity.

This studio is structured around four phases: Phase 01: From Above -Counter-Narratives, Phase 02: From Within- Land and Ocean as Medium – In the Field, Phase 03: From Below-A Future-Kin, Phase 04: The Counter Empire Exhibition of 1924. The teaching and learning schedule includes a series of guest lectures and a range of mapping, narrative, film, and modelling workshops aligned with each of the phases. We will be working closely with the Powerhouse Museum, CSIRO, Geosciences Australia, Whitsunday Regional Council, and the Australian Department of Energy and Resources.