Inside, A Collapsing Building 2023

Betty Russ and Michael Donnelly for Arts Northern Rivers’ Site Lab public art commission.

August - Sep, post-flood abandoned bank, Bundjalung

Buildings provide us shelter and foster our sense of permanence and stability. They extend our private, internal spaces into the collective network, echoing the structures of thought, exploding our systems of reference and understanding into the spatial, material world our bodies occupy. 

Buildings also assimilate our physiological and psychological frailties with the hostilities of the natural world, allowing us safety and comfort in a landscape alive with diversities, many operating against our interests. The notions of permanence and sustainability that buildings provide exist solely as a construct, maintained by our subjectivity in discourse with our surroundings. What is left when we no longer maintain our communion with the places we’ve built?

On entering the building,  made devoid of activity following a catastrophic ecological event, the sense of a speculative post-human intervention is evident. Formed by the broken and rearranged materials once used to house capital exchange, are material utterances of pre-destruction activities, and post-human growth. Ad-hoc water vessels, pumping sustenance to and from micro-worlds, inhabit pockets of space within the cavernous shell. An awareness from within the apparently non-sentient amalgamations of matter, trigger response to human presence, sensing movement and responding with sound and light. Understanding of objects and apparatus is familiar, yet against interpretation. 

Image credit: Fabian Pertzel