Kerb 31: Limit
Quarry Pedagogies ran as two consecutive five-day programs in February 2023 at Beech Forest, Victoria, at the site of a 140-year-old former Quarry in the Otway Ranges. The camp brought together a community of designers and creative professionals to consider the site and its post-extractive condition, rehabilitation as an expanded practice and how to foster cultures through place.
This piece was assembled by Millie Cattlin and Joseph Norster while working on a book about Quarry Pedagogies camp. Voices came back as we worked through the process of transcribing presentations and workshops. In this piece, Joe and Millie have a shared voice; Ilana Russell, Raphael Kilpatrick and Jen Lynch reflect on the camp through conversation, and other voices are directly taken from workshops and presentations during the camp.
There is a large hole at the centre of the site – the quarry – defined and contained by an edge. The contours of the edge rise to a second edge: a ring of high ground around the quarry, with another outer ring defined by the site boundary.
The quarry floor is open and exposed, with views into it from points around its edges. It’s a blasted and weathered terrain, kept low and slow by the lack of any substantial soil depth.
The edges are another story. Under tree canopies and up slopes, there is an abundance of slight moves and quick flurries – willie wagtails dart and dive, hunting for insects; blackberries thrive; there are ferns, bracken, the crunch of tree branches underfoot; incomplete paths, ledges and log seats. Wombat holes, lines traced through grass and leaves made by rabbits, voles, foxes, echidnas and cats.
‘This is like a metaphorical song line because the train line followed my great-great-grandfather’s walking track up to the Otways here. That was a well-worn track back in the old days, which we believe it was ... What makes me able to talk here is because of the union of my great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother and how they walked through this Country.’ Richard Collopy
‘Ecologies at the edge’ is a term we started using in the lead-up to Quarry Pedagogies Camp.
It captures both the intention of the camp – a community of practitioners working at the edges of disciplines, edges of knowledge, edges of comfort, edges of capacities – as well as the ecology of the site as a post-extractive landscape, no longer deemed of value through an economic model.
In the gully we are kneeling and scratching at the ground. ‘Disturbance doesn't necessarily have to be a negative thing,’ says Alistair Kirkpatrick. ‘This is where I want us to remove the value judgments and actually think about what opportunities ecologically the construction of the quarry has created, and also think about why the quarry is here and how we are all complicit in the quarry’s existence.’
They’re difficult sites, they’re problematic and there isn’t necessarily an easy solution for them. We leverage constraints and find alternative modes of engaging with these sites. We don’t come to a site with preconceived ideas of what it should be – we respond to what they need and what they can do from the state in which they are.
Foundational in our approach is an appreciation that we don’t have all the answers for projects when we begin. Hence communities that came together during these camps are integral in shaping projects over the long term.
‘Another thing that makes this site endlessly fascinating from an ecological perspective is we get to see processes that we think of taking millennia in rapid succession.’ Alistair Kirkpatrick
The ability to fix and care for places is a powerful driver for approaching sites. Coming across the quarry after working in urban contexts, and the opportunity to work within the broader context of the extractive industries has been a valuable expansion of our practice.
Some of the biggest questions for us relate to time. We have lots of time, but we have limited resources to fund this project, so taking our time is important. A core question that drives our approach is about how we can slow down the process of rehabilitation and push against conventions through the rehabilitation plan to see how long we could take to do it.
‘There are several reasons why I do this workshop,’ explains Andy Miller – ‘to give ourselves permission to sit and pause and question notions of efficiency and production. It’s a way for us to be open to endless combinations and re-combinations. And the curiosity that is elicited when things are uncertain. It’s not so much how we shape a place, we are also subject to being shaped by it. We’re shaped by being in relationship to place; and to the physicality of a place.
‘I’ve collected all this waste material called tailings; it’s the material you can’t use that’s leftover from the mining process,’ explains Nicholas Burridge. ‘I've been thinking about the way that sandstone forms and the way we quarry rock, and the way we often try to recreate natural materials through different means – concrete being one of the best examples. They call it an anthropic rock, a kind of human-constructed rock-like material. I’m taking all this waste material and trying to stick it back together in a futile way. Recreating what happens over millions of years in a few afternoons here in the quarry. And then hopefully watching these rocks that I’ve made degrade back into the landscape and seeing that solidification and erosion happening in a sped-up way.’
‘If you just do enough to initiate someone else to come along and engage with that, then it will become something else and take on a life of its own. We saw that with the canteen, especially where the sink was just draining onto the ground and quickly that was turned into a drainage system, and then that was adapted for the second camp and became a wetland. These things get added to and there were compost heaps that were sort of constructed outside of that. And some of that is in the thinking of the design process and the building and the materials by inverting these things, making it obvious what’s unfinished, making it obvious how something has been constructed so that language then gets taken up and responded to by a community observing that process of building these objects.’ Richard Collopy
‘Interestingly, you mention this unfinishedness to the design and the structure. I understood this openness as an invitation to the participants to be able to make their own mark or be able to build into elements of the site collectively, and that openness was an opportunity for people to co-author and have agency over the space and the structures of the site and the program.’ Ilana Russell
‘There is a parallel between the openness of giving it enough structure but leaving it open-ended and flexible. In terms of thinking about the program, there were a few different aims – One was thinking about the dynamics that might form between a group over a week-long duration, how you break the ice and how you start to operate collectively and creatively. The other was about introducing specialist perspectives that gave people access to an expanded understanding of the site and some of the complex themes and legacies that it represents. And then thirdly, this intention to allow people the space to respond to the site through a creative set of actions.’ Jen Lynch
When planning the Camp and considering our roles, we didn’t want to become stereotypical camp leaders with all the answers and who told everyone what to do and when to do it. We were interested in testing ways of developing the structure with looseness as well as an invitation for people to work on self-initiated projects if they wanted. There was no expectation that you would contribute; it was just an invitation to do so if you wanted. We were interested in testing out how tangential programs or activities would happen that weren’t directed by us. By extension, we were also working in parallel on projects ourselves, as opposed to facilitating projects.
‘We kept telling ourselves – it's not a conference because we don't want it to be passive. And it’s also not a studio because there's not a brief, and there's not an expectation to present something that could be productive in a particular kind of way. It resembled these things, but it tried to also hold back from these because they set up a certain routine way of operating that we were trying to resist. Just thinking about the day-to-day operations of the camp – bathing, cooking, doing the dishes, walking to your tent and sharing a tent with somebody. Those provided these infinite formats to connect with other people.’ Describes Jen Lynch.
We discovered parts of the quarry that we had lost. Parts of the quarry opened for us physically that we had forgotten about or had changed radically over the last few years. There was this regular moment of delight when we would stumble across a new part of the Quarry. It felt like we’d stepped into a new little world.
‘What I loved about it goes back to this idea of operating at the edge and falling out of these predictable frameworks in which we tend to communicate and exchange. I think there was a way of responding to people's practices; they brought their contributions through these other completely unexpected ways that took many different forms.’
We were a bit blown away by the outrageous generosity of everybody. I expected people to be polite and reasonable, but there was something other than that which took our breath away.
Millie and Joe developed the project in collaboration with Jen Lynch and Raphael Kilpatrick. Jen Lynch is a landscape architect whose research explores the Commons as an alternative lineage to landscape. Raphael Kilpatrick's research and practice explore the role building as a process has in informing community and environmental relationships.