Quarry Pedagogies
Quarry Pedagogies is an ongoing program of camps held at the Quarry.
Quarry Pedagogies combines rehabilitation (as an ongoing activity and open-ended process), camping (its operations, projects, temporary communities) and creative practices.
We are establishing a place for collaboration, creative work and research, as a core part of the rehabilitation of the site, and we invite others to propose and initiate camps at the Quarry as part of this work.
Watch a short film from the 2023 Quarry Pedagogies Camp here.
1. Motivations
Test alternative modes of rehabilitation
Quarry Pedagogies aims to develop projects and programs that explore alternative modes of rehabilitation.
By proposing alternate modes of rehabilitation we seek to challenge perceptions of land being damaged until returned ‘back’ to a fixed state before extraction, as this misrepresents environments and ecologies as fixed, and by extension separates agency and acts of care from the work of rehabilitation.
Reframe site conditions as opportunities
What are the conditions of this unique site and its post-extractive landscape, and what opportunities are offered when we reframe rehabilitation not just as an outcome, but as a process and a subject?
Quarrying represents a cultural attitude towards land that has had destructive effects on the environment. We are interested in reframing these existing conditions as unique opportunities and as starting points for different kinds of conversations. The blackberry at a specific scale encapsulates this attitude; an invasive species that has however been the focus of collective harvests and creative responses.
Establish communities of practice and cultures of place
We are interested in exploring how groups can work together and how cultures of place can be established over time. The Quarry welcomes interdisciplinary researchers from the fields of art, architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, geography and planning to form a community.
We hope that by bringing together this diversity of practices and perspectives, the camps create a unique space to share ideas and make work together around the premise of rehabilitation. The aim is for new approaches to be collectively tested and shared, as well as forming a community around The Quarry that can lead to longer-term conversations and projects.
Inform future development
With the intention to use the Quarry as a place for education, research and creative practice, and with camping as the primary accommodation for groups in the years ahead, camps run on-site are learning exercises. which can inform design decisions about how to locate and operate the infrastructure required to support groups, and to develop and coordinate programs, activities and routines.
Relating to spatial arrangements:
- What are the opportunities of the site and its various ecologies?
- What spaces are best for gathering together, and what spaces are best for quieter moments?
- How does the site and its infrastructure work at a range of scales?
- Campsite locations – platforms, clustering of tents, and aspect?
Relating to programs and activities:
- What are the site’s cycles and flows of activity – a morning, a day, a week, a year?
- How do operations and creative programming work together?
- What are ways of structuring time and programs that are most generative and supportive?
- How do we best find a balance between individual times and collective activities?
Broadcast the project
The Quarry represents a type of landscape that is prevalent across Australia: an estimated 60,000 former sites of extraction require rehabilitation. Having learnt what is possible – what works and what doesn’t work – we hope to expand the potential of alternative approaches to rehabilitation across other similar sites. We are also interested in how the Quarry can operate as a base camp, linked to a larger network of creative spaces, public programs, education and rehabilitation work in the region.
2. Values
Minimal Impact
Observation
Close observation: We encourage looking more closely and from various angles at the site’s particularities – its ecologies, material specificities, human and more-than-human community.
Slowness and attentiveness: As we reverse the Quarry’s historic course, we are also slowing down, moving away from values driven by economics and efficiency. We are resisting the approach of ‘fixing’ the Quarry. Instead, we’re opening a process through which we are constantly looking, listening, learning and responding.
Collective action and co-production
Collective action: Camps on site brings us into a temporary community where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We’re all learning from each other. Sharing is encouraged, whether through a drawing or a conversation.
Respectful relationships: The site and communities are held together by interrelationships and interdependencies. We acknowledge the historical impact of colonisation and extraction that have shaped this place. We aim to reorient this impact.
Co-production by teams and campers: The Quarry and the camps run here are genuine co-production. We invite everyone to play an active role in its ideas, its operations, its community, and therefore its rehabilitation process. This is not a conference and visitors are by no means an audience.
Experimentation
Experimentation through open-endedness: There is no known endpoint or outcome to the Quarry. We’re instead holding a space and process open to testing and learning.
Camp as provocation: Camps run on site are unique in that they bring us onto the site and into a community, living and working together. It generates a temporary world that is not only connected to context but also very much apart from the settings, routines and relationships in which we usually live and work.
Working at the edge: This phrase has come to have many meanings for this project. In particular we are interested in considering working at the edge of practice, at the edge of what’s possible, what’s easy, and what’s known.
3. Project work, tools and materials
Self-initiated projects
We consider project work and group work as important aspects of Quarry Pedagogies programs.
Camps at the Quarry are not conferences. As a way of unpacking notions of rehabilitation, engaging with the Quarry and stepping outside familiar routines, we encourage projects of many forms – walking, building, digging, assembling, making, drawing, collecting, harvesting, picking, propagating, cooking, fermenting etc.
We value visitors to the quarry as collaborators and contributors and encourage active and productive engagement with the site. We are truly inspired by the diverse skills and practices that are revealed when people come together and actively do things.
We hope that project work and group work expand our collective understanding of the Quarry and notions of rehabilitation, as well as build a discourse and a community of practice through the simple act of doing things together.
Projects have in the past extended from / responded to:
- The site; what is observed, what is found, what is fascinating
- Blackberries, and other ‘invasive’ plants
- The infrastructures, operations and activity modes of the site
- The site’s values and motivations
- Quarry rehabilitation actions
- Quarry readings (available for download upon request)
- The community and the diverse practices and interests everyone brings to the site
The quarry has been set up so that the site can support self-initiated projects through a range of spaces, tools and materials.
Spaces
All constructed spaces are temporary at the Quarry and have been built using a range of sourced and recycled materials.
Workshop: Simple tools and equipment for timber-based work.
Outdoor studio: Covered outdoor space connected to the workshop with a projector and sound system.
Canteen and meals area: Protected areas for cooking, food preparation, eating meals and gathering.
Tools
Observing: binoculars, magnifying glasses, drones
Measuring: tape measures, thermometers, Ph strips, marking chalk, string
Moving: tractor, wheelbarrow, buckets, shovel
Building: mobile timber mill, workshop tool
Communicating: rolls of paper, projectors, speakers, sound recorders
Materials
Lengths of timber including structural timber, LVLs, fallen branches, and timber boards
Bricks of various shapes, sizes, materials and colours
Rock in different sizes and locations
Water in tanks, in puddles, in water bodies
Steel of various lengths and thicknesses
4. Program and routines
Quarry Pedagogies programs generally involve guided activities, contributions in the form of workshops and presentations, early morning walks, and meals, as well as time for self-initiated projects and downtime.
Routines structure the essential cycles of the day, with moments of intense activity, times for production, reflection, pause and quiet. Everyone is invited to share ideas and have conversations throughout these daily activities and routines.
5. ARBV (Architects Registration Board of Victoria) Continuing Professional Development
Formal CPD is available for Quarry Pedagogies Camps, as all camps have thematically linked agendas and themes, as outlined above.
Learning objectives
Learning from researchers, theorists, ecologists, artists, architects and landscape architects; participants engage in activities, workshops and presentations which generally include the following learning objectives:
- Coming to understand and appreciate novel landscapes and disturbed ecologies and their potential as spaces of production, and learning.
- Coming to understand quarries within the context of the built environment and how material use and flows produce sites such as this one – that all material has a past life and a future life and we have an obligation and a duty to appreciate this through our professional practices.
- Developing an appreciation for our role and responsibility as designers of the built environment, and how material use and flows produce quarries and post-extraction landscapes.
- Learning from Traditional Owners and developing an understanding of different modes of caring for Country and how these inform design
- Understanding care, care-based practices and the role of caretaking within design.
Quarry Pedagogies includes content relevant to the 2021 NSCA across all three Professional Capabilities – Professionalism, Communication and Environmental Practice – and the Units of Competency – practice management and professional conduct, project initiation and conceptual design, and detailed design and construction documentation.
Mode of Assessment
Quarry Pedagogies Camps are highly participatory and all workshops and activities involve active participation from all those in attendance. The mode of participation involves conversation, group activities, supplementary readings, drawing and mapping activities, as well as a reflective writing component at the end of the Camp, with feedback provided by the Camp organisers.
Following attendance and participation in relevant Quarry Pedagogies Camps, participants are provided with a set of questions via an online form. These questions involve reflection on what was learned, and what the experience and undertaking of the camp mean in the context of each person’s professional practice.
Following the submission of answers, participants receive a transcript of responses as evidence of attendance and completion of the session and the CPD training.
For further infromation or enquiries about attending or booking Camps, please contact us at info@quarryprojects.com.au
6. Further information
If you are interested in participating in future Quarry Pedagogies camps please provide your details below.
Quarry Pedagogies
Quarry Pedagogies is an ongoing program of camps held at the Quarry.
Quarry Pedagogies combines rehabilitation (as an ongoing activity and open-ended process), camping (its operations, projects, temporary communities) and creative practices.
We are establishing a place for collaboration, creative work and research, as a core part of the rehabilitation of the site, and we invite others to propose and initiate camps at the Quarry as part of this work.
Watch a short film from the 2023 Quarry Pedagogies Camp here.
1. Motivations
Test alternative modes of rehabilitation
Quarry Pedagogies aims to develop projects and programs that explore alternative modes of rehabilitation.
By proposing alternate modes of rehabilitation we seek to challenge perceptions of land being damaged until returned ‘back’ to a fixed state before extraction, as this misrepresents environments and ecologies as fixed, and by extension separates agency and acts of care from the work of rehabilitation.
Reframe site conditions as opportunities
What are the conditions of this unique site and its post-extractive landscape, and what opportunities are offered when we reframe rehabilitation not just as an outcome, but as a process and a subject?
Quarrying represents a cultural attitude towards land that has had destructive effects on the environment. We are interested in reframing these existing conditions as unique opportunities and as starting points for different kinds of conversations. The blackberry at a specific scale encapsulates this attitude; an invasive species that has however been the focus of collective harvests and creative responses.
Establish communities of practice and cultures of place
We are interested in exploring how groups can work together and how cultures of place can be established over time. The Quarry welcomes interdisciplinary researchers from the fields of art, architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, geography and planning to form a community.
We hope that by bringing together this diversity of practices and perspectives, the camps create a unique space to share ideas and make work together around the premise of rehabilitation. The aim is for new approaches to be collectively tested and shared, as well as forming a community around The Quarry that can lead to longer-term conversations and projects.
Inform future development
With the intention to use the Quarry as a place for education, research and creative practice, and with camping as the primary accommodation for groups in the years ahead, camps run on-site are learning exercises. which can inform design decisions about how to locate and operate the infrastructure required to support groups, and to develop and coordinate programs, activities and routines.
Relating to spatial arrangements:
- What are the opportunities of the site and its various ecologies?
- What spaces are best for gathering together, and what spaces are best for quieter moments?
- How does the site and its infrastructure work at a range of scales?
- Campsite locations – platforms, clustering of tents, and aspect?
Relating to programs and activities:
- What are the site’s cycles and flows of activity – a morning, a day, a week, a year?
- How do operations and creative programming work together?
- What are ways of structuring time and programs that are most generative and supportive?
- How do we best find a balance between individual times and collective activities?
Broadcast the project
The Quarry represents a type of landscape that is prevalent across Australia: an estimated 60,000 former sites of extraction require rehabilitation. Having learnt what is possible – what works and what doesn’t work – we hope to expand the potential of alternative approaches to rehabilitation across other similar sites. We are also interested in how the Quarry can operate as a base camp, linked to a larger network of creative spaces, public programs, education and rehabilitation work in the region.
2. Values
Minimal Impact
Observation
Close observation: We encourage looking more closely and from various angles at the site’s particularities – its ecologies, material specificities, human and more-than-human community.
Slowness and attentiveness: As we reverse the Quarry’s historic course, we are also slowing down, moving away from values driven by economics and efficiency. We are resisting the approach of ‘fixing’ the Quarry. Instead, we’re opening a process through which we are constantly looking, listening, learning and responding.
Collective action and co-production
Collective action: Camps on site brings us into a temporary community where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We’re all learning from each other. Sharing is encouraged, whether through a drawing or a conversation.
Respectful relationships: The site and communities are held together by interrelationships and interdependencies. We acknowledge the historical impact of colonisation and extraction that have shaped this place. We aim to reorient this impact.
Co-production by teams and campers: The Quarry and the camps run here are genuine co-production. We invite everyone to play an active role in its ideas, its operations, its community, and therefore its rehabilitation process. This is not a conference and visitors are by no means an audience.
Experimentation
Experimentation through open-endedness: There is no known endpoint or outcome to the Quarry. We’re instead holding a space and process open to testing and learning.
Camp as provocation: Camps run on site are unique in that they bring us onto the site and into a community, living and working together. It generates a temporary world that is not only connected to context but also very much apart from the settings, routines and relationships in which we usually live and work.
Working at the edge: This phrase has come to have many meanings for this project. In particular we are interested in considering working at the edge of practice, at the edge of what’s possible, what’s easy, and what’s known.
3. Project work, tools and materials
Self-initiated projects
We consider project work and group work as important aspects of Quarry Pedagogies programs.
Camps at the Quarry are not conferences. As a way of unpacking notions of rehabilitation, engaging with the Quarry and stepping outside familiar routines, we encourage projects of many forms – walking, building, digging, assembling, making, drawing, collecting, harvesting, picking, propagating, cooking, fermenting etc.
We value visitors to the quarry as collaborators and contributors and encourage active and productive engagement with the site. We are truly inspired by the diverse skills and practices that are revealed when people come together and actively do things.
We hope that project work and group work expand our collective understanding of the Quarry and notions of rehabilitation, as well as build a discourse and a community of practice through the simple act of doing things together.
Projects have in the past extended from / responded to:
- The site; what is observed, what is found, what is fascinating
- Blackberries, and other ‘invasive’ plants
- The infrastructures, operations and activity modes of the site
- The site’s values and motivations
- Quarry rehabilitation actions
- Quarry readings (available for download upon request)
- The community and the diverse practices and interests everyone brings to the site
The quarry has been set up so that the site can support self-initiated projects through a range of spaces, tools and materials.
Spaces
All constructed spaces are temporary at the Quarry and have been built using a range of sourced and recycled materials.
Workshop: Simple tools and equipment for timber-based work.
Outdoor studio: Covered outdoor space connected to the workshop with a projector and sound system.
Canteen and meals area: Protected areas for cooking, food preparation, eating meals and gathering.
Tools
Observing: binoculars, magnifying glasses, drones
Measuring: tape measures, thermometers, Ph strips, marking chalk, string
Moving: tractor, wheelbarrow, buckets, shovel
Building: mobile timber mill, workshop tool
Communicating: rolls of paper, projectors, speakers, sound recorders
Materials
Lengths of timber including structural timber, LVLs, fallen branches, and timber boards
Bricks of various shapes, sizes, materials and colours
Rock in different sizes and locations
Water in tanks, in puddles, in water bodies
Steel of various lengths and thicknesses
4. Program and routines
Quarry Pedagogies programs generally involve guided activities, contributions in the form of workshops and presentations, early morning walks, and meals, as well as time for self-initiated projects and downtime.
Routines structure the essential cycles of the day, with moments of intense activity, times for production, reflection, pause and quiet. Everyone is invited to share ideas and have conversations throughout these daily activities and routines.
5. ARBV (Architects Registration Board of Victoria) Continuing Professional Development
Formal CPD is available for Quarry Pedagogies Camps, as all camps have thematically linked agendas and themes, as outlined above.
Learning objectives
Learning from researchers, theorists, ecologists, artists, architects and landscape architects; participants engage in activities, workshops and presentations which generally include the following learning objectives:
- Coming to understand and appreciate novel landscapes and disturbed ecologies and their potential as spaces of production, and learning.
- Coming to understand quarries within the context of the built environment and how material use and flows produce sites such as this one – that all material has a past life and a future life and we have an obligation and a duty to appreciate this through our professional practices.
- Developing an appreciation for our role and responsibility as designers of the built environment, and how material use and flows produce quarries and post-extraction landscapes.
- Learning from Traditional Owners and developing an understanding of different modes of caring for Country and how these inform design
- Understanding care, care-based practices and the role of caretaking within design.
Quarry Pedagogies includes content relevant to the 2021 NSCA across all three Professional Capabilities – Professionalism, Communication and Environmental Practice – and the Units of Competency – practice management and professional conduct, project initiation and conceptual design, and detailed design and construction documentation.
Mode of Assessment
Quarry Pedagogies Camps are highly participatory and all workshops and activities involve active participation from all those in attendance. The mode of participation involves conversation, group activities, supplementary readings, drawing and mapping activities, as well as a reflective writing component at the end of the Camp, with feedback provided by the Camp organisers.
Following attendance and participation in relevant Quarry Pedagogies Camps, participants are provided with a set of questions via an online form. These questions involve reflection on what was learned, and what the experience and undertaking of the camp mean in the context of each person’s professional practice.
Following the submission of answers, participants receive a transcript of responses as evidence of attendance and completion of the session and the CPD training.
For further infromation or enquiries about attending or booking Camps, please contact us at info@quarryprojects.com.au
6. Further information
If you are interested in participating in future Quarry Pedagogies camps please provide your details below.
We respectfully acknowledge the Gadubanud People as original inhabitants of the area now known as the Otway plains and ranges. We respectfully acknowledge elders – past, present and emerging. We extend our deepest respects to all First Nations peoples. In the context of the work we do, we express gratitude for our shared connection through place, to the oldest continuing cultures on earth.
The Quarry is operated and managed by These Are The Projects We Do Together.
We respectfully acknowledge the Gadubanud People as original inhabitants of the area now known as the Otway plains and ranges. We respectfully acknowledge elders – past, present and emerging. We extend our deepest respects to all First Nations peoples. In the context of the work we do, we express gratitude for our shared connection through place, to the oldest continuing cultures on earth.
The Quarry is operated and managed by These Are The Projects We Do Together.