TERROIR have been shortlisted - in a team including Richard Goodwin, Andrew Benjamin, Ingo Kumic and Dan Hill - for the Australian Pavilion in the 2010 Venice Biennale.
The Creative Directors for our 2010 Pavilion - Ivan Rijavec and John Gollings - are curating an exhibition titled "NOW and WHEN" - comparing Gollings' magnificent photographcs of Australian cities with a series of proposition about these cities in the future.
Our submission, titled "Fraying Ground", uses texts by Andrew Benjamin on the work of TERROIR and Richard Goodwin as a portal through which the city in 2050 is reconsidered by the team as a whole.
Part of our submission text is as follows:
""Porosity, fraying, knotting, etc are all ways of redefining relationality that allows for another economy of lines. In addition they need to be understood as modes of thought and design that take potentiality as central and reposition control. Not the abandoning of control, rather its having a different figure: a difference allowed for by its separation from a specific economy of activity. Thus, fraying within the city will work to redefine public and private spaces no longer as a binary opposition or as a matter of degree. The fraying of lines, the loosening of borders marks the implicit porosity of the urban.
In this context if we then were to ask - where does architecture start? – we cannot answer by evoking the figure of the architect. Such an evocation would be no more than the final refrain of an aesthetics of “genius.” Developments within the history of design techniques – many of which are central to the ongoing work of TERROIR and Richard Goodwin – have rendered such an aesthetics redundant. Once reposed the question of the beginning involves the ground. And yet, the ground must always be more than its literal presence."