Claire Greenland

Green Red Rock looks at to what extent do geologic representations of Western Australia reproduce colonial legacies through multiple forms of extraction. Green red rock as an archival platform starts to actively scrutinise how we are collectively applying themes, ideas and visual tropes of cartographic traditions to the representation of current inland Australia. Green Red Rock is an archival platform that embodies the logics of cartography to disrupt our notion, our understanding, of how the landscape has been imagined. Through incorporating a critical narrative that runs against the settler colonial view. The platform incorporates a process of learning, unlearning and relearning with the outcome embodying this entire process. 

Intervening into our ways of seeing through 4 different levels; various forms of cartography, scanned aerial imagery and legislative and access perspectives, the archival platform actively scrutinises and disrupts the representation of the landscape.

Through incorporating multiple scales, spaces, times and viewpoints, the layering representation aims to disrupt the totalising system imposed on the land and draw connections to the multiple stakeholders.

The storage of value within the rock explores questions around the extraction of matter, the organisation of mining corporations, government bodies and 1st nation people within the landscape. Regardless of the removal of terra nullius and the granting of native title, strategic and organised corporations continue to re-penetrate this land due to the weak land rights. The railway line, a conjunctural infrastructure fulfils its primary role of transporting stolen land out and flowing mining corporations in.

The storage of heritage within the rock explores forms of mapping and how the mapping of heritage is the precursor to the digital mapping of natural resources. As Mining practices continue to expand in the Pilbara region of WA, more sacred sites continue to be treated by extractive destruction. Inorder to expand their sites, mining corporations are offering to capture and preserve the sites using drone footage. How is digital scanning a paradox as a preservation of the landscape?

The storage of information within the rock explores the connection of digital claiming to its physical, questioning research practices and positionality. How is the landscape's digital formation a representation which is rooted within the colonial gaze? Exploring the forms of representation of the landscape through historical and contemporary cartography. It questions to what extent do geologic cartographies of western Australia reproduce colonial legacies of traditional forms of western mapping? 

Green Red Rock is an archival platform which actively scrutinises and disrupts the representation of the landscape. It intervenes in our ways of seeing through 4 different levels; various forms of cartography, scanned aerial imagery and legislative and access perspectives. The archival platform starts to actively scrutinise how we collectively apply themes, ideas and visual tropes of cartographic traditions to the representation of current inland Australia.

Cartography, Scanning, Legislation, Access

The archive serves as a repository of colonial forms of representation that can be accessed by anyone. The web-based digital landscape is a multi-user open-world platform which allows a user or group of users to interact with information in a landscape having the capability to freely roam. The interface is a ‘worlding’ experience; its intention is to dismantle and disrupt the single perspective notion of totality imposed on the site by settlers. Digital conversation is encouraged through the use of the platform’s interface comments bar. 

The platform is scalable. Additional archival layers, material, alternative landscape representations and forms of disruption can be applied to the platform. A number of blank structural stands have been included to facilitate this; new material can be uploaded through the ‘plus’ button on the digital interface. 

The structural stands of the digital platform act as transferable objects, facilitating future movement of the archive from the digital realm to the physical. The physical stands can adapt to different spaces. In the physical setting, a more collaborative and open conversation is facilitated and the sites in which the archive is placed can be project specific and targeted. For example the physical structure could be placed in the foyer of an institution, within the halls of government building, next to desks within an architectural practice, or in the exhibition room of a gallery space. The archive targets ‘settler’ constructs and its representations of the landscape and therefore, by placing the physical archive in specific locations, conversations can be generated which critique and challenge the notion of how the landscape has, and is, being represented.