Pinnacles, Perth, Pub and Pilbara - Eleanor Peres and Alex Psaltis ( Fabrics). Ngiyanhi-gu ngidyi-galia - Matte Ager-McConnell, Rhiannon Brownbill, Roger Miranda Navarro

This is a limited edition print of Paradise Journal, an online and open-access publication for critical and experimental work on architecture in Australia.
Issue 01: Backyard

Pinnacles, Perth, Pub and Pilbara -  Eleanor  Peres and Alex Psaltis ( Fabrics). 

This audiovisual essay transforms material from a mid-twentieth-century archive of “Australiana” photography books in large-format hardcover. These images were captured decades ago on stolen land that has still not been ceded. Its authors acknowledge and pay respect to Aboriginal communities past, present and emerging on both Gadigal and Wurundjeri lands where they practice.

In the absence of human ownership, the backyard fence becomes obsolete. We take a deeper temporal view where the chaos of shared experience renders the entire nation one big backyard. Not yours or mine but ours. Lichen leaks over architecture’s partitions and mycelium follows tree roots to escape property borders deep below the soil’s surface. Bushfire smoke traverses international date lines without a passport while subterranean coal seams burn deep underground.

Paradise Journal, 2021
English
Softcover, 18 pages
105mm x 150mm

Ngiyanhi-gu ngidyi-galia - Matte Ager-McConnell, Rhiannon Brownbill, Roger Miranda Navarro

This continent colonially known as Australia has historically persisted with oppressive cartographic practices; processes of mapping reducing the physical realities of Country to arbitrary lots, lines and symbols on a page. These acts of cartography have resulted in the exploitation and essentialisation of Country to the architectural convention of “site”. This practice, entrenched in spatial discourse, discards Indigenous Knowledges, and contributes to the extractive capitalist project.² It values place only by its utility³ as an object worthy of possession.⁴