KOOZWhat prompted the investigation of the Pilbara Interregnum design studio?

JORGE VALIENTE ORIOLPilbara Interregnum was a design studio I ran in 2021, with twelve students in their last term of the Master of Architecture at the University of Sydney. Each student developed a design proposal and wrote a thesis in response to a brief, which was part of a research/creative/pedagogical project that I am currently working on with my colleagues from GRANDEZA (www.grandeza.studio) and BAJEZA, called Seven Allegorical Micro-fictions for the Pilbara.

The Pilbara is an immense, arid, and thinly populated territorial crust in the north of Western Australia. Since the first Anglo-Saxon incursions in the region – only 160 years ago – the Pilbara’s prolific mineral deposits have been extracted under an alleged ‘national consensus’ around Australia’s Lucky Country and Fair Go mythologies. Still today, an extractivist common-sense (now imbued by techno-determinist, neo-feudalist, and hyper-capitalist logics) seems to rule the region.

As a dramatic example of this, in 2019, the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto detonated the Juukan Gorge – the only inland site in Australia with evidence of continuous human occupation for over 46,000 years. Considered a sacred site for the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (Binigura) peoples, this rock shelter was blasted, with ministerial permission, to expand the Brockman 4 iron ore mine. Two years after, in 2021, and despite two years of planetary hold – fostered by the disruption of a global pandemic – the Pilbara Ports Authority broke its annual mineral exports record, consolidating the region’s non-official title as the “powerhouse of the nation,” while deepening the existing wealth inequalities (and power asymmetries) in the area and beyond.

The Pilbara, however, is also a historical epicentre of resistance where unresolved territorial disputes keep challenging the alleged ‘extractivist consensus’ of a seemingly de-politicised Australia. For example, the Pilbara Strike – which took place between the 1st of May 1946 and August 1949 – was the most prolonged strike movement in Australian history. Aboriginal people defied the owners of pastoral stations while reclaiming independence from the colonial patriarchal aggressors and the end of slavery. The three-year-long interruption of wool exports became a fundamental milestone in the country’s political history.

What prompted both the research and the studio was precisely the amalgamation of unresolved territorial disputes in the region, as well as the “tentacular geographies” that connect these situated struggles with some of the most universal and urgent questions of our time – such as the “green-gold-rush” (driving the current energetic transition), the entrepreneuralization of the space race, or the ongoing processes of post-colonial reparation, amongst others. These “tentacular geographies” also connect the Pilbara with other geographical locations such as Pattaya, London, Perth, the Lithium Triangle, or the surface of Mars, amongst others.

KOOZ How does the brief explore and challenge the role of the architect within our contemporary anthropogenic scenario?

JVO Both the research and the studio frontally reject the reductive framing of the Pilbara as a passive, extractive, and remote hinterland – a sacrificed land in the name of “progress”. Indeed, Pilbara Interregnum recognises this region as a centre-stage-territory where the most radical political and epistemological transformations of our time are already taking place.

In the first stage, students were asked to delve into a series of situated and unresolved territorial disputes within the region – what we called ‘battlegrounds’. Students analysed these ‘battlegrounds’ as the ongoing manifestation of historically, politically, and culturally contingent phenomena. By using allegorical representation – both as research and design tools – students unpacked the material and imaginary conditions of these ‘battlegrounds’, as well as the contending forces and disputes in place (ideological, economic, legal, technological, environmental, cultural, etc.)

In a second stage, students were asked to intervene in these ‘battlegrounds’ and to transform them into the testing grounds of alternative social, political, and ecological contracts for a ‘post-extractivist’ Pilbara. Students were meant to use architectural representation techniques to make visible the terraforming violence in the region and propose an allegorical spatial project that viscerally responds to it.

The sites of their interventions were still active mine pits, ports, railways, and other extractive infrastructures in the Pilbara.

KOOZ What potential does it attribute to the power of architectural research and the space of the imagination?

JVO One of the main purposes of this exercise was to stop thinking about the dynamics shaping the Pilbara as an “inevitable” extractive resources’ battlefield, and to start re-thinking the region as a ‘theatre of operations’ where an epistemological war of political imagination takes place.

During the studio, two significant challenges required a constant re-examination of the premises of the brief. First, we needed to frame what we understood by 'extrativism' critically, so we could begin to grasp what a 'post-extractivist paradigm' could look like. But extractivist logics are so normalised and naturalised that we might not even realise it when replicating or perpetuating them. Therefore, a process of estrangement and de-familiarization required the whole class to immerse in numerous reading, thinking, and debating sessions, which stimulated very fertile processes of cross-pollination and honest peer-critique amongst the students.

Somehow, we operated as a "post-extractivist (anti) think-tank" of sorts, where processes of ‘hypothesis-making’ and ‘world un-making’ required high doses of risk, experimentation, and critical reflection.

The second challenge was to de-haunt the students’ imaginations from one of the biggest fallacies that architecture schools have perpetuated over the last decades: the "problem-solving narrative". If we think seriously about some of the biggest challenges of our time – such as climate change, resources depletion, or radical inequality, amongst others – architects have mostly been part of the problem rather than a solution. Moving away from the trope of architecture as a “toolkit-of-solutions”, the student’s interventions into the analysed ‘battlegrounds’ were not meant to force a ‘(re)solution’ to the existing conflicts (or battles). Instead, the projects were meant to inhabit the ‘battlegrounds’ with a threefold ambition: (1) to re-balance the power forces in place; (2) to make visible and bring forward their agonistic potential for a necessary public debate; and (3) to unleash a project of political imagination that entangled with the messiness of radical democracy.

The following paragraphs unpack three students’ projects along with a short interview with each of them, in which they contextualize their proposals in relation to the questions posed by the studio brief.

KOOZ How does your project respond to the brief?

CAITLIN CONDON In response to the brief, my project seeks to explore and inhabit the haunted landscapes of extractive hinterlands. Situated in the bowels of Rio Tinto’s Marandoo Mine, the project re-appropriates the existing program to mine the politics of haunted landscapes and unearth new collaborations with other-than-human worlds. Archives, galleries, living museums, performance spaces and cemeteries all come together as a theatre of Gaia where multiple practices of knowing come together to un-know. Through architectural interventions, narratives that span the skewed privileges of history are earthed and unearthed, churned and digested, grieved and ungrieved. Cultural reparation is pursued through acts of cultural deconstruction, destabilising our identities as ‘human’ to destabilise our human-centric structures of society. In re-imagining Marandoo mine, the project attempts to transform the national endeavour of mining into the national endeavour of cultural reparation.

KOOZ How did you approach and explore the potential of architectural representation as a medium?

CC The studio’s staged deliverables encouraged us to fully embrace the potential of different drawing typologies. The ‘battlefield map’ was used as a medium to forensically analyse Marandoo. Complex cultural storylines and temporal conflicts are distilled onto a single image of archaeological interrogation. The medium of the ‘allegory’ played with these observations to formulate the conceptual agenda of the project. A selected dialogue of symbols, ideas and narratives was carefully selected and choreographed to uncover new critical mythologies. The critical clarity afforded by these two mediums enabled the additional body of images to explore speculative architectural interventions of the mine and their accompanying rituals.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imagery?

CC The conceptual enquiry of my studio thesis centred around this quote by Donna Haraway: “it matters what worlds world worlds”. To me, the power of the architectural imagery reveals in the moments of visceral tension that tap into worlds other than. The more successful images managed to orchestrate a tension between clinical control and intense emancipation at both ends of the spectrum, either as vibrating messiness or disquieting subtleness. As in all theoretical projects, the success of the architectural interventions lies firmly in the imagery that reveals it. My project aims to stage a battlefield of cultural destruction and production, and therefore my imagery needed to embrace a monstrosity and discomfort capable of worlding new worlds.

KOOZ How does your project respond to the brief?

JAMES FENG Restaging Gaia’s Horizons: Territorial Theatres & New Critical Monumentality in the Age of the Anthropocene is a project that restages the already extreme, dramatized infrastructural networks of Port Hedland – currently the largest bulk export port in the world. Situated in Australia’s Pilbara region, Port Hedland was once better known by the indigenous Ngarla people as ghrugada, meaning “as far as the eyes can see”, characterising its mirror-smooth terrain and expansive horizon.

The project responds by deconstructing Port Hedland’s horizons and materialising the multiplicity of many visible and invisible ‘horizons’, ultimately re-staging them as a sequence of territorial dioramas. Inspired by early Surrealist modes of operation, railways, bulk conveyors, and cranes are rematerialised into autonomous staging infrastructures that hover over landscapes while embedded pulley systems suspend freeform architectural interventions. Visitors are invited to indulge in the city’s abundance, from participating in the Feast of Uncanny Bodies at an off-shore oyster farm situated on the remnants of the dredged shipping channel in the Indian Ocean, to celebrating the Festival of the Many Moons, hosted at the vast salt evaporation ponds, framed against the mountainous gleaming, white sea-salt stockpiles. For as far as the eyes can see, through an engagement with neolithic and astrological monumentalities and rituals, in this blooming human wilderness, we begin to conceive and test new, emerging worlds.

KOOZ How did you approach and explore the potential of architectural representation as a medium?

JF As a project that operates on multiple scales and territories, encompassing both natural and artificial landscapes after decades of dramatic terraforming, compressive and expansive representation methods were used in tandem to heighten its storytelling qualities. The compressive representation of the diorama brings compositional clarity onto which ideologically-driven interventions can be introduced. Renders at the human scale are inspired by philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s rich depiction of the ‘carnivalesque’: the profanation, the mischievous freedom, and the ground-up emergence of ideas inspired the collective self-authoring of new critical mythologies that are staged by these monuments. The union of this multiscalar tapestry through the compressive device of the diorama and the expansive quality of architectural rendering invites a wider audience to participate and inhabit the architectural imaginary – activating a primal sense of wonder from within.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imagery?

JF The architectural imaginary is an all-encompassing ‘world-building’ of new socio-political, economical, and sensorial systems of habitation. Its power, therefore, comes from its appeal to totally and completely immerse an audience, an estranging experience that suspends our spectrum of social biases. Projects that respond to the imaginary are inevitably borne of the questioning of current climates – making it oddly relevant in thought-provoking, uncanny ways. To me, its allure is undeniable and ever-present, always encouraging a reframing of the immovable as temporary and fragile; and with the unknown as a force of the sublime. Through an explorative immersion with the imaginary, we discover delightfully unexpected footings and positions that inform our aspirations to bettering the world around us.

KOOZ How does your project respond to the brief?

MARCO PECORA Harrowing Walls for Nomadic Futures is an allegoric city which responds to the colonial and extractive legacy of the Minderoo Station with a prioritisation on celebrating alterity. The notion of alterity refers here to both the human and the more-than-human – from the Thalanyji Peoples to the grey nomads, from the camel to Wanamangurra, also known as the Rainbow Serpent or Ashburton River. The project fictionalises the closure and reoccupation of the existing Minderoo cattle station, currently owned by billionaire iron mining magnate Andrew Forrest. Inspired by the Rights of Nature Movement and real-world legal trials, the Ashburton River and the more-than-human entity Wanamangurra are imagined having been recognised as holders of personhood and, as such, the city represents a sovereign zone owned by the river itself.

KOOZ How did you approach and explore the potential of architectural representation as a medium?

MP Minderoo was the site of a well-documented massacre against the Thalanyji Peoples. Thus, tracing ownership and colonial inheritance urged for an in-depth and multiscalar analysis. The research traces the past, present and future violences that have and continue to shape the site, a legacy epitomised today by Andrew Forrest's extractive water developments, protested by the Thalanyji Peoples. In a way, the allegoric city makes that "invisible" violence visible, it becomes too monumental to ignore, and turns it against the determinist/extractivist/productivist logics that justified that colonial violence in the first place.

A series of perimetral walls and monoliths which dramatically interrupt existing roads and fences (thus obstructing the previous extractive industries and the colonial mythology of privatised land), encompass a field of ‘autonomy generators’ and ‘follies for unlearning’. Within these walls, both pre-planned and incidental spaces are carved, requiring the time and labour of both the human and more-than-human inhabitants of the city, that will perpetually re-render its fabric. These are architectural representations of palimpsest drawings, spaces that can embody and exude the knowledge and exchange within.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imagery?

MP The architectural imaginary, in this case, allows for the flexible and evocative proposal of an architectural intervention informed by a complex multiscalar historical/social/political analysis, that has the potential to promote and envision alternative futurabilities where the reclamation, memorialisation, propagation, and proliferation of identities, knowledges, and sovereignty (territorial, linguistic, cultural, and political) define the life of the imagined city.