ABOUT
LIQUID INFRRASTRUCTRES
CREDITS
LIQUID INFRASTRUCTURES
‘All over the world, land reclamation has played a major role in the reduction of the aesthetic, recreational and scientific value of the shore. Reclamation has destroyed thousands of kilometres of natural coastline, much of it of very high landscape quality; it has buried beaches and infilled inlets formerly used for recreational purposes including bathing, boating and fishing, and it has degraded and obliterated wetlands formerly enjoyed by naturalists’.
- Brian L. Hudson, 1996, ‘Cities on the Shore: The Urban Littoral Frontier’.
The intention of Liquid Infrastructures is to create an in-comprehensive and fragmented account of the Central ‘Sydney’ Estuary.
A focus on the industrial infrastructure which facilitated the transference of material between the land and the sea, operating on reclaimed lands around the estuary. A necessary alteration of the foreshore to allow unchecked and rampant growth of the young colony.
The archive provides a window into the industrialisation of so-called ‘Sydney’. Yet the intention of this project is not to create another archive of the industrial activity bordering the Harbour. Instead it is to explore incidental gaps amongst the ‘early’ recounts of the industrial happenings within and around its waters. These gaps offer fleeting descriptions of a struggling and fragile ecological network.
Categorised as wetland and estuarine, the narratives within offer glimpses at the ecologies which nurture, filter and stabilise foreshore aquatic environments. They are as globally connected as the trade and material networks which superseded their habitats.
THE CENTRAL ‘SYDNEY’ ESTUARY
The Central ‘Sydney’ Estuary, ‘CSE’, can be defined by the region spanning from the Drummoyne Headland to the Middle and South Head opening, and is characterised by extensive land reclamation process and industrialisation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Reprogramming and restoring these post-industrial or interim sites to health is a task frequently handed over to the Landscape and Architectural design practices. There is a desire to improve upon and ‘beautify’ these locations in an effort to undermine or outright remove their legacy of extraction, production and material displacement.
Liquid Infrastructures suggests an alternate methodology, which is primarily concerned with narrative making, and providing a framework for deciphering the post-industrial landscape, and embedded ecologies surrounding the harbour. The project is equally concerned with archiving the species within these highly contaminated sites, and contextualising them within the harbour’s ecosystem, offering a glimpse into an overlooked more-than-human world.
Reprogramming and restoring these post-industrial or interim sites to health is a task frequently handed over to the Landscape and Architectural design practices. There is a desire to improve upon and ‘beautify’ these locations in an effort to undermine or outright remove their legacy of extraction, production and material displacement.
Liquid Infrastructures suggests an alternate methodology, which is primarily concerned with narrative making, and providing a framework for deciphering the post-industrial landscape, and embedded ecologies surrounding the harbour. The project is equally concerned with archiving the species within these highly contaminated sites, and contextualising them within the harbour’s ecosystem, offering a glimpse into an overlooked more-than-human world.
THE REMNANT ARCHIVE
“In this sense, both the historian and the archivist inhabit a sepulchre. They maintain an intimate relationship with a world alive only by virtue of an initial event that is represented by the act of dying. This being the case, writing history merely involves manipulating archives.“
“Archives, like history, draw on the impulses of introspection and anticipation, as they seek to systematise the chaos of the past, organising the fragments of the old world in ways that can renew the world we inhabit.”
- Bhekiziwe Peterson, 2002, ‘The Archives and the Political Imaginary’, in Refiguring the Archive.
“Archives, like history, draw on the impulses of introspection and anticipation, as they seek to systematise the chaos of the past, organising the fragments of the old world in ways that can renew the world we inhabit.”
- Bhekiziwe Peterson, 2002, ‘The Archives and the Political Imaginary’, in Refiguring the Archive.
The artefacts left behind by these industrial projects are dead, however the colonial archive continues to give them presence today. The voices which curate this archive are the same voices which built the violent, industrial fabric of the harbour. This way of maintaining the colonial archive upholds Sydney's history as an infrastructural operation. Instead, the stories within this website explore a way we can dismantle the archive, so that we might discover what they didn't want us to acknowledge or recognise.
Not all artefacts are investigated equally. Time has obscured some more than others, yet still all have stories, all have historical pasts, and all have related presents. Rewriting each of their histories through this archive project, rewriting them as ecological narratives, is an intentional act of reorganising historical events. In the reorganising, landscapes can be understood through a set of terms and functions that allow their ecological stories to emerge, rather than their industrial counterparts.
The website is centred around an open and interactive map which focuses on producing a resource that shares how these infrastructural operations are connected to the current and future development of the CSE. The communication of the ecological stories is represented through a series of collected and speculated stories, images and drawings. This representation, both distressing and hopeful, advocates for human and non-human survival.
Not all artefacts are investigated equally. Time has obscured some more than others, yet still all have stories, all have historical pasts, and all have related presents. Rewriting each of their histories through this archive project, rewriting them as ecological narratives, is an intentional act of reorganising historical events. In the reorganising, landscapes can be understood through a set of terms and functions that allow their ecological stories to emerge, rather than their industrial counterparts.
The website is centred around an open and interactive map which focuses on producing a resource that shares how these infrastructural operations are connected to the current and future development of the CSE. The communication of the ecological stories is represented through a series of collected and speculated stories, images and drawings. This representation, both distressing and hopeful, advocates for human and non-human survival.