Interpretive Wonderings

Campbell Drake and Jock Gilbert

01_Intro

Examining the criteria by which events-based modes of spatial practice are discussed, this paper critically reflects on a mapping workshop that took place in September 2015 at Culpra Station; an 8,500 hectare property situated in rural New South Wales. Titled ‘Interpretive Wonderings’, the project sought to build upon a body of critical cartographic work that approaches mapping as ‘performative, participatory and political.’¹ Taking place in September 2015, thirty Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants were invited to the station property to produce interpretive mappings through which to explore multivalent understandings of country.

Exploring the difficulties of articulating the performative attributes that constitute creative practice in the field, this paper discusses three creative works produced during the ‘Interpretive Wonderings’ mapping workshop: Thomas Cole’s Extract, Sam Trubridge’s Night Walk and Campbell Drake’s Instrumental. Whilst varied in their approaches and conceptual agendas, these projects share similarities within the performative operations enabled through event-based modes of spatial practice.

The performative operations inherent in these projects are temporal and realised in the making to ‘produce a transformation in a situation between a subject and the environment’.² Each project addressed is characterized by a shift ‘away from representational and historical ways of knowing’³ instead refocusing ‘the agency of spatial practice in relation to an active subject’⁴ ‘opening the work up to a wide field of possible orders.’⁵ In this sense, the criticality of each project examined here lies in the making, rather than in the outcome. Traditionally held orders of knowledge through representation are opened up releasing them to speculative and interpretive realms both in relation to the artist and the context in which the work is created.

02_The Context_(Site)

The ‘Interpretive Wonderings’ workshop took place in September 2015 at Culpra Station. Situated in rural New South Wales, north-west of Euston and 50km south-east of Gol Gol, the property shares boundaries with the Murray River and the Kemendoc National Park. Formerly used for grazing and cropping property on the Murray River floodplain, the 8,500 hectare property was purchased by the Indigenous Land Council in 2002 as part of a land bank established for Indigenous people. In 2012, the title was handed on to the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation.

The property is home to locally and culturally significant vegetation as well as fauna including the spectacular but endangered Regent Parrot. It is country where red-gum forests thrive in watery billabongs, mallee scrub grows in fields of red sand, gnarled box and tangled lignum spread across wide heavy black soil plains and wetlands can swell and recede in a moment.

Along with these spectacular environmental features, the property is home to a number of significant Aboriginal cultural heritage sites including Aboriginal burials, ancient fire hearths, shell middens, scarred trees, a fish trap, and an ochre quarry. These are overlaid with colonial pastoral relics including stockyards, irrigation earth forms, fencing, abandoned homestead sites and settler graves.

03_The Context_(Critical Cartography)

The only maps of Culpra station are cadastral ones; paper objects made by government agencies to value and manage parcels of land. During the workshop, participants were invited to collaborate with the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation to develop an alternate vision of Culpra Station by means of interpretive mapping.

The architectural commentator James Corner⁶ has drawn attention to the ‘agency of mapping’ and it is this approach that broadly configures the project’s stance towards the map. Privileging open-ended forms of creativity, Corner posits that the agency of mapping lies in its propensity to unfold potential. The potential that Corner refers to here exists in relationship to more than the sum of the physical attributes of a place or space that are considered as ‘surface expressions of a complex and dynamic imbroglio of social and natural processes’⁷. It is rather the potential for the unfolding of new relationships of economic, cultural, legislative, political and experiential processes.

Corner’s definition of agency in this sense might be considered to be the approach towards a critical act – a questioning of the relation between theory and practice through praxis. Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till⁸ take this idea further in pursuing the notion of spatial agency and locating this in alternative forms of practice. Such alternative forms of practice are, in these terms, deeply political and position the practitioner as such. Outcomes of these alternative practices allow the cartographic form to move beyond the cadastral and embrace the immediacy of the temporal through performance, installation and the ephemeral. Till and Schneider draw on the work of Anthony Giddens and his conception of agency. They note that Giddens ‘states first and foremost that agency ‘presumes the capability of acting otherwise’ as a starting point or precondition for agency. Taking this a step further, agency is here defined as the ability to influence one’s broader intellectual and political context. As such, spatial agency is defined as achieving that influence through means other than the traditional – be that architectural or cartographic.

The approach of the project that took place at Culpra Station draws on the idea of mapping as an act of agency, informed by a body of work that is characterized as critical cartography. The critical cartographer Jeremy Crampton⁹ has positioned this approach as ‘performative, participatory and political’, defining the map beyond its generic definition as an ‘instrument for preserving meaning and truth’ by thinking of it as critical and anti-hegemonic. This form of critical mapping contests dominant power structures inherent in conventional cartography, often involving itself in the production of ‘fixed’ conditions, including boundaries, ideas, concepts, territories and relationships.

Relative to the context of Culpra Station, scalar aerial projections and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies have produced maps which constitute a fixed rendering and flattening of much of the remarkable features of the property – both physical and cultural. This simultaneously produces a hegemonic fixing or stabilizing of the powerful institutional interests implicated in neighboring properties – often controlled by Government agencies such as the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, which is tasked with producing these maps over time. In re-performing or re-engaging with these hegemonies as fixed relationships, the ‘Interpretive Wonderings’ workshop event was realised through the notion of spatial agency – calling forth a capacity to ‘act otherwise’ through an alternative mapping practice which is inherently temporal, political and participatory but also necessarily processual. The architectural theorist Peg Rawes¹⁰ has proposed the idea of the ‘in-process’, in particular in relation to the ‘relational ecologies’ and the ‘cultivation of relations of care’. This notion of ‘in-process’ suggests a far more fluid approach to relationships, and a moving beyond the hegemonic.

04_The Method_(Mapping Workshop)

Engaging the performative potential of mapping, thirty Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants were invited to Culpra Station to produce interpretations of the material and immaterial qualities of country.

For the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation, the expectation was that the mapping outcomes produced would help to realign relationships with neighbouring land management agencies and in particular the territorial relationships enacted through the existing maps which valorise ‘straight-line’ boundary conditions with little scope for collaboration or shared endeavour across these boundaries.

In response to local Indigenous stories, spatial narratives and sites of cultural and environmental significance, participants were asked to produce mappings with the stipulation that a relationship to the specificity of country is demonstrable. Participants produced maps through journeys and conversations using digital, analogue and performance based media. The outcomes include a collection of mapping artefacts in a range of media including sound recordings, collections, performance, video, assemblages, writing, drawings, installation and photography.

The mapping outcomes were exhibited at the Mildura Arts Centre gallery in February 2016, and whilst exhibiting the maps within an established institution such as the Mildura Art Centre constitutes a spatial agency of its own, this paper is concerned with the performative attributes that constitute creative practice in the field.

05_The Performative

‘Performative’ is a term taken here from within the field of performance studies as a means to reposition a form of events-based spatial practice that is concerned with temporal relations between people, environments and action. Opening up this field of inquiry, this paper draws on the writing of Jan Smitheram¹¹ who suggests the ‘value of this shift towards the performative is that it moves us away from representational and historical ways of knowing’. Adopting the performative as ‘a mechanism to break from successive traditions’, the workshop scrutinizes the stable and the static in favour of processual and fluid ‘performative’ operations.

Central to positioning a working definition of the performative in relation to ‘Interpretive Wonderings’ is Erika Fischer-Lichtes' writing in The transformative power of performance. Fischer-Lichtes suggests that a performative act is a situation in which a distinct object is not presented to be perceived and interpreted; instead a transformative spatial condition is produced, provoking ‘a situation of here and now, transforming everyone into co-subjects’.¹²

Extending this idea is the assertion that performative operations are spatially activated and co-produced by people, environments and action. The performative affect upon these relational ecologies is to destabilise dominant power structures across a variety of spatial constructs. These shifts in spatial and environmental relationships produce emergent behavior, ‘opening the work up to a wide field possible orders’¹³ including refocusing the agency of spatial practice in relation to an active subject and ‘recoding, shifting and transforming meanings.’¹⁴

In regards to ‘Interpretive Wonderings’, the strength of these operations lie in the transformative potential within the mapping process, and it is here that the performative attributes that constitute creative practice in the field find relevance. The inherently temporal, fluid and processual nature of performative transformation renders it momentary, co-produced and reliant on spatial and relational context. The temporal and contingent nature of performative transformation alludes to the difficulties of grasping such a condition and draws attention to the obstacles of recording and describing the performative attributes that constitute creative practice in the field.

In an attempt to articulate the performative transformations that occurred in the field at Culpra Station, we discuss three projects: Thomas Cole’s Extract, Sam Trubridge’s Night Walk and Campbell Drake’s Instrumental. In tracking the development of these projects, it is possible to critically reflect on three stages of mapping:

1. Pre-workshop proposal

2. Mapping in the Field

3. Post-workshop reflection

06_Project 01: Extract by Thomas Cole

Extract: Pre-workshop

In response to an invitation to take part in ‘Interpretive Wonderings’, Tom Cole used the Australian Soil Resource Information System to identify that on Culpra Station there exists over ten different soil types located within 1.5 kilometres of the event site. Titled Extract, Cole proposed to expose the rich diversity of these soil types. First using Google Earth to construct an autonomous Cartesian grid, and then a hand auger, Cole proposed to bore sixteen soil samples to a depth of one meter at the grid point intersections in order to map geological relations within the Culpra Station landscape.

The proposed grid was to consist of sixteen points set apart at two hundred and fifty meter intervals constituting a square of 1 kilometre sides. According to Cole, ‘the auger mechanism and geological process is generally associated with soil testing, primary production and mining.’ Relative to the recent acquisition of Culpra Station by the Indigenous Land Corporation, the process of extracting soil can be seen as a political act. By re-colonizing the land and soil through a formal, rational device, Cole’s project polemically re-imposes a grid on the landscape. The extractive nature of this act was noted in relation to Indigenous understandings of country.

Prior to carrying out the project, Cole proposed that the soil samples would be exhibited as a series of freestanding glass tubes positioned at 1.5m intervals. Repurposed within the gallery, the reconstituted soil samples were to be re-presented and spatially arranged in relation to the sites from which they were sampled. Scaled down in both vertical and horizontal axes, the intended outcome of Extract was to provide a geological mapping of Culpra Station through a tangible topographical and material relationship between the gallery and the field.

Extract: The Event/Workshop

Despite favourable weather conditions and a zealous approach to completing the laborious task at hand, after three days of digging Cole had completed only 6 of the intended 16 soil samples with the imposed grid, providing only limited exposure to the diversity of soil types intended. Instead of the red, black and white soils identified at a distance by the Australian Soil Resource Information System, Extract was providing soil samples with only slight variations of grey.

Requiring a re-calibration, Cole approached Barry Pearce, the host of the event and secretary of the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation for advice. Cole writes ‘I was lucky enough to enjoy a conversation with Barry about the varied soil conditions of Culpra and the impact of European farming practices. Parts of this conversation tracked an Indigenous perspective on country, local tensions around water and Indigenous concepts of sustainable land management.’¹⁵

Extract: The Performative in the Field

Informed by local knowledge, the realisation that the proposed 16 points of extraction were excessive, overly ambitious and not able to produce the desired outcome, Cole abandoned the Cartesian grid to re-position two further points; one to collect the white clay from the edge of the Murray River and the second a kilometre up country to sample the red earth of the Mallee. As Cole writes; ‘The initial proposal had a deliberate naiveté that examined the landscape through precise objective data. The reality of the landscape informed by discussions with Barry, saw the program adjusted with intuition and subjective appraisal.’¹⁶

This re-orientation of the process in which the work was executed demonstrates the performative nature of Cole’s work in which a transformation took place between a situation, a subject and the environment; between the act of soil sampling, the artist (Cole) and Culpra Station. This processual re-adjustment and abandonment of the Cartesian grid is evidence of the destabilisation of the fixity of the geological conditions as identified by the Australian Soil Resource Information System. In ‘catalyzing the interaction between formation and the subject’, Extract is opened up to a wide field of possible orders’¹⁷ refocusing ‘the agency of (performative) spatial practice in relation to an active subject’¹⁸

07_Project 02: Night Walk by Sam Trubridge

Extending upon performative operations that shift spatial and environmental relationships, Sam Trubridge’s project, Night Walk, demonstrates the ability of performative acts to recode, shift and transform meanings.

Night Walk: Pre-workshop

Prior to the workshop, Trubridge proposed to map Culpra Station by negotiating a passage through the landscape from within a large inflatable ball constructed of black plastic rubbish bags and sticky-tape. Seeking a dialogue with the local Indigenous community through the notion of a ‘storied terrain’, Trubridge’s proposal suggested the work would be ‘challenged by its intersection with Indigenous practices and narratives’. As Trubridge writes, ‘Conducted as a blind navigation or migration through the landscape the condition of blindness reveals tensions between the body and the cultural and geographic terrain that it passes through.’¹⁹

Night Walk: The Event/Workshop

Scheduled to depart across country in the early afternoon, Trubridge filled the ball with air using a 12-volt pump connected to his car. He then carried the partially inflated ball up the escarpment to the launch site situated on the wide black soil plain speckled with saltbush and thorny low shrubs. As a small crowd gathered in expectation of the performance, a breeze caused the ball to temporarily deflate. After an extended tussle between inflation devices, the breeze and ground conditions, audience members assisted Trubridge and the ball was re-inflated. Trubridge entered the ball through a small opening and proceeded to walk from within the plastic ball out across country under the glaring midday sun, and the gaze of the gathered audience.

Scratched and punctured, the ball gradually deflated as Trubridge journeyed towards the horizon – a distance of just less than a kilometre. Trubridge writes, ‘As the journey proceeds, the movement across various surfaces perforates the thin plastic, creating a constellation of pinpricks for the walker within. Walking in a straight line involves following this ‘milky way’ around the rotating sphere.’²⁰

Night Walk: The Performative in the Field

In locating performative attributes of Night Walk, it can be argued that whilst the work was limited in its proposed engagement with the Indigenous community and the myriad of social relations existing at Culpra Station, the work produced instead a performative space of encounter in which a transformation took place between a situation, a subject and the environment. In this space, the act of blind navigation of the artist (Trubridge) within the country of Culpra Station, opens the work up to a wide field of possible outcomes.

Whilst perhaps unintended, the notion of blindness can be read through a post-colonial lens in which the fragility of a deflating foreign object evokes a certain futility in which the colonizer attempts to locate himself within an Indigenous understanding of space blinded by western epistemic constructs. There is also in this work a registration of the inherent (but often unacknowledged) separation in normative mapping systems – between the mapper and the mapped – which is fundamentally the map itself (the artifact).

In Trubridge’s work, the relationship between the act of mapping and that of being mapped is gently inverted, where the device used for mapping, in this case a makeshift inflatable, is gradually broken down by the very country it traverses. Through this process the relationships between the subject (Trubridge the ball) and formation (mapping country) are reordered and, one can argue, reconstituted. The spherical form of the ball suggests a trajectory across country that might well be erratic or arc-like but the actual trajectory is linear – describing a straight line running parallel to the existing linear boundary between the property and the National Park. In this way, the project reveals, and potentially destabilises, dominant power structures within the contextual spatial constructs of Culpra Station. As Trubridge writes, ‘The mapping process does not aim to define or claim the landscape for the work, instead it seeks an understanding of the cultural, geographic, disciplinary, conceptual territories that it traverses. As such, it is an open-ended action that invites and embraces the challenges, interaction, acceptance, or rejection that may arise from embarking into such an environment.’²¹

08_Project 03_Instrumental_Campbell Drake

Instrumental: Pre-workshop

Further exploring the performative attributes that constitute creative practice in the field, Campbell Drake’s Instrumental is a work that explores piano as a performative mechanism to renegotiate situations, subjects and environments. Prior to the workshop Drake proposed to relocate an upright piano to Culpra Station with the intent of exploring the colonial implications of the piano within the context of an Indigenous-led mapping workshop.

In Drake intial project proposal he writes that Instrumental ‘involves the sourcing of an upright piano which will be transported and positioned in the former Culpra Station homestead. The re-appropriation of the homestead explores the notion of spatial agency in which the piano is deployed as a performative mechanism to renegotiate the relations between participants and country. The research investigates the proposition that performative strategies are spatially activated and co-produced through a relational field of spectatorship, action and spatial context.’²²

Instrumental: The Event/Workshop

Driving from Sydney, Drake, with the assistance of Tom Cole, located and collected an upright piano on a farm in Barham, some 400 kilometres down stream of Culpra Station. Arriving at Culpra Station, the original proposal to invite participants to play the piano that was to be situated in the former homestead was revised.

As Drake explains, ‘when arriving at Culpra Station to investigate the performative relations between the piano as colonial instrument and Culpra Station as Indigenous country, positioning the piano in the former homestead was deemed inappropriate. Restricting the performance to the homestead seemed reductive in comparison to the expansive context of the 8500 hectare property. If the spatial context I had intended to explore was that of Indigenous space, the homestead that was once occupied by pastoralists was the wrong environment in which to situate the performance.’²³

Instead, Drake spent several days driving around scouting out the diversity of the Culpra station landscape in search of an appropriate site. Settling upon a location framed with gnarled dead gum trees upon dusty red soil, the piano was unloaded and positioned in the midday sun.

A local piano tuner from Mildura was commissioned to travel to Culpra Station and asked to tune the Piano to the best of his abilities. For thirty minutes, the piano tuner grappled with the instrument that had not been played in over 50 years. Suffering from a cracked timber frame, the act of tuning and tightening strings only put additional pressure on the internal mechanisms sliding in and out of tune as the tuner moved through the keys from one end to the other.

Instrumental: The Performative in the Field

Instrumental was originally conceived as a piano recital in which Drake proposed to invite a live audience. Instead the work was reoriented into a spatial dialogue between the piano, the tuner and the landscape. Whilst a handful of spectators were present during the work, the staged act of tuning the piano in the landscape rendered the spectators secondary to the discursive space which emerged between the piano, the tuner and the spatial context of Culpra Station. Realised in the making, Instrumental allowed for a recoding of the relationship between country and artifact in which the tuning of an instrument that is synonymous with Australia’s colonial past brings into focus the spatiality of politics relative to Indigenous land rights and land reclamation.

09_Conclusion: Performative Attributes:

The project Night Walk suggests a transformation in a relationship between a subject and the environment. It is a transformation realised in the making which catalyses interactions between formation and the subject by opening the work up to a wide field of possible orders and outcomes. In a gently tangential way, Night Walk embraces some of the myriad social and environmental relations constitutive of space at Culpra Station, allowing the relationship between people, country and mapping to be recoded, shifted and transformed.

In the project Extract, a transformation took place between a situation, a subject and the environment; between the act of soil sampling, the artist (Cole) and Culpra Station. The processual re-adjustment and abandonment of the Cartesian grid in the project evidences a realisation in the making – the realisation of a space producing a recoding of the geological conditions and a potential transformation of the meanings and political implications of these conditions.

The inherently temporal, fluid and processual nature of the performative transformations in each of these projects are by definition momentary, co-produced and reliant on spatial and relational context. This is to say that the performative is spatially activated and co-produced through the relational field of people, action and spatial context. The performative operations inherent in each project are temporal and realised in the making to produce a relational transformation between a subject and this spatial context.

Each of the projects addressed here is characterised by shifts away from traditional, normative representational and historical orders and instead can be seen to be located in alternative modes of practice that address transformative combinations of that are both discursive and practical. The manifestation of the transformations in scalar terms are often modest and almost always ephemeral. The issue of scale, along with the temporal and spatial fluidity of the transformations themselves, make clear just how difficult it is to describe and record the value of the performative.

Interpretive Wonderings was produced in collaboration with the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation. A PDF catalogue from the associated exhibition is available here.

References

Cosgrove, Denis E., ed. Mappings. Reprint. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Print. Critical Views.

Crampton, J, ‘Cartography: performative, participatory, political’ in Progress in Human Geography. 2009 33: 840 originally published online 21 May 2009.

Corner, James. ‘The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention’ in Mappings. Reprint. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Print. Critical Views.

Cole, Thomas, Interpretive Wonderings Post Event Survey ‘Extract’, 2015

Doucet, I. and Cupers, K. ‘Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice’ in Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal, Issue 4, Spring 2009.

Drake, Campbell, Interpretive Wonderings Project Proposal ‘Instrumental’, 2015.

Drake, Campbell, Interpretive Wonderings Post Event Survey ‘Instrumental’, 2015.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Kolarevic, Branko, and Ali Malkawi, eds. Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality. New York: Spoon Press, 2005. Print.

Rahim, Ali. ‘Performativity : Beyond Efficiency and Optimization in Architecture’ in Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality. New York: Spoon Press, 2005. Print.

Rawes, Peg. Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity. N.p., 2013. Print.

Smitheram, Jan. ‘Spatial Performativity/Spatial Performance’ in Architectural Theory Review 16, no. 1, April 2011.

Trubridge, Sam, Interpretive Wonderings Project Proposal ‘Night Walk’, 2015.

Trubridge, Sam, Interpretive Wonderings Post Event Survey ‘Night Walk’, 2015.

Footnotes