Concept Outline

Parkville; Shelter and Grace. Underpinning our research for this creative project are two main anchors.

The engagement with history and future

The first is the image of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. In a small painting by Paul Klee, an angel, catapulting towards the sun, looks back at the world it is leaving, allowing for an intense, rich moment of simultaneous past and future reflection. Benjamin took inspiration from this image, and in 1940 he wrote movingly on the ability to look both back and forward into culture and time.

“The Klee painting, titled Angelus Novus, shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” 1

The inspiration from this concept has been applied to the removal of much-loved and valued trees from an urban site. We need to acknowledge their importance while moving forward with future projects and visions.

The acknowledgement and memorializing of them are important, as is the presentation of visions of and for the future, for generations of staff and students at the University. Art is a brilliant mechanism for realizing all of this potential, as we aim to demonstrate with this report.

The unique feature of the University site; relationships based on learning and the sharing of pedagogical information

The second anchor is the unique ability of the University to support and sustain pedagogical relationships of all kinds; between students and academic staff, artists and mentors, professors and their PhD candidates, technical experts and curators of museums. Across every field in the University, the transfer and engagement of knowledge, ideas, learning, wisdom, experimentation, risk and creativity flourish and grow every day. As obvious as this may be, it is a fact that is inspiring to many, and we want to build these narratives and histories into our project in a meaningful way. We feel that it must be at the core of our creative response and this aspect of our research has greatly influenced all of our key projects.

1 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969: 249

“Environmental stresses, wounding, fire scars and insect infestations tell the story of a tree’s life. Looked at in this way, a tree is like a book; it’s history can inform the design process and determine a particular way to cut the timber to open its pages.”