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The National Gallery of Victoria invited eight leading Australian landscape architecture and design firms to present a new vision for the lands and waterways of Birrarung (the Yarra River), in a public exhibition at NGV Australia from August 2024 – February 2025.
Looking beneath the surface of the Birrarung’s lands and waters, this project focuses on the upper Birrarung in Yering and Yarra Glen. The soil cores sample the catchment’s subterranean conditions over the next fifty years. Refocusing soil as a fundamental and honest indicator of societies progress. Here, there are no concrete drains to uncover, no apartment buildings to ‘green’ and no industrial areas to ‘re-wild’. Only natures ancient technologies, the providers of life, consistently and honestly reaching to us for care and compassion.
TCL created a series of ten speculative soil core samples and media clippings that depict a challenging yet resilient future. Each soil profile tells a reassuring story, that by accepting and deeply understanding unstable climatic conditions we may face in the future, the river, its lands and the lives they support can heal and endure. The health of the river is measured by environmental complexity beyond our vision, beneath its surface.
The Problem
In Yering, there is no concrete drain to daylight.
No apartment buildings to 'green'.
No industrial areas to ‘re-wild’.
The Yering – Yarra Glen region, in the outer east of Melbourne, is in the upper reaches of the Birrarung. On the surface, it has the appearance of a natural environment – idyllic rolling hills, remnant bushland, billabongs; the river cuts a path through a lush, rocky basalt gorge.
Digging deeper, however, we discover that this region – home to Sugarloaf Reservoir Naarm’s source of drinking water – succumbs to the pressures of the contemporary world. A landscape that absorbs the decay and demand outsourced by the city. . The intensity of agriculture, viticulture and farming have taken a heavy toll on the land. Fertilizers and pesticides permeate through compacted layers of soil; golf courses have highly altered the land, the flow of Birrarung and her billabongs, introducing weeds that get carried far and wide down the river system. The banks of Birrarung are degraded and brittle; waste and refuse catch in branches carried up by flood waters.
The Proposition
With regret, we accept an unstable climate.
We can't turn back time, but we can move forward.
Our proposition truthfully grapples with the climate crisis—the challenges of extreme drought, fire, and devastating floods ahead of us. Accepting this, we imagine a hopeful future in which humans honour interconnectedness and stewardship, compelled to care for the world we live in and the waters that sustain us.
The proposition acknowledges the hard work that it will take to achieve this future and plots a series of significant environmental, economic and societal shifts reflected through seemingly small changes in soil. Shifts in agriculture, farming, water consumption, attitudes toward flood, fire, and drought, and enabling the river system to expand and contract on its own terms within the land. The enablement of near-extinct species to thrive and live in abundance. Acknowledging that the values of our future have been here for 60,000 years.
The Cores
The story of our soil profile is one of reassurance.
The life of our river and its landscapes have endured.
We represented the proposition through a series of ten ‘core samples’.
Each core is carefully composed based on our future timeline. In which we move through acceptance of the climate crisis, respectful engagement with ancient natural technologies and lastly, with stewardship as a core value within society, we reciprocally deploy digital technologies.
~2025: Toxic Tides.
~2030: Dire Drought.
~2035: River Liberation.
~2040: Regenerative Farming
~2045: Plentiful Native Grains.
~2050: Stewardship Prevails.
~2055: Birrarung’s Voice Returns. .
~2060: Mycellium Magic.
~2065: Empowered Ecologies.
~2070: Reciprocal Technology..
Scarred, unstable landscapes, healed again and again. Life is incredibly persistent.
We look below the surface and peer into Birrarung's resilient past and future.
A lens into understanding how our physical actions demonstrate who we are, to the core.
The Installation
The exhibition, which is represented in two parts, includes ten speculative core samples and a series of future media clippings.
The physical manifestation of the cores reflects the hands-on approach and hard work needed to achieve the vision. Each core sample was created using a combination of digital collage and AI image generation. These were printed on cotton fabric and assembled into cylinders.
The TCL team collectively hand-embellished the cores with found objects from the site and remnant donated threads and fibres. The TCL team spent time on the banks for the Birrarung in Yering, foraging and stitching to create the cores. Through the poetic expression of landscape, these artistic objects embody the site, the problem and the proposition.
