WELCOME TO THE IMPERMANENT CITY

All across Melbourne, every day, every year, buildings are being erected and demolished. It happens to all buildings eventually – the celebrated and the canonised, and the innocuous and the nondescript. Most of these buildings disappear without a trace, leaving later generations unaware they ever existed. But sometimes, we are left with a trace, a scar, a remnant, or a fragment.

In a hundred years everybody here – me included – will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me begins to seem unreal, as if a gust of wind could blow it all away.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2003

These fragments go largely unnoticed by most Melburnians. They move like ghosts among us, silently incorporated into our urban streetscape. By exploring the history of these dislocations from another time their stories unravel, and their significance as tangible links with the city’s past is revealed.

Original structures are destroyed and others built on their foundations; new meanings are superimposed on the old; some memories and histories rest on others, submerged or largely forgotten. Yet just like the manuscript, marks and traces of the past overwritten by the present are still there, lying underneath each place, an integral part of that place, even if rubbed smooth.
Maria Tumarkin, Traumascapes, 2005

The Impermanent City celebrates and mourns Melbourne’s relentless transitional carnage through these building fragments. The empirical footprints left behind from earlier building epochs, these fragments are the visible tip of a larger body now spectral. Their protrusion into this reality is with the apparent improbability of having emerged from another, representing the impact point of two colliding universes. We require little imagination to locate the foundations of our built environment, for they are still here with us, buried in the euphoria of the present.

THE RISE AND FALL OF MELBOURNE’S SKYLINE

Many of the famous ruins of the world, despite their various levels of decay, are valuable tools for interpreting past civilizations and cultures. A fragment gives a sense of place: a tactile element that connects us with the past. To many, it is not what the building looked like that matters so much, it is the sentimentality about a place now gone, and the associations and memories of it that are most important.

Rubble is the future. Because everything that is, passes.
Anselm Kiefer, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2005

An architectural fragment, no matter how small, provides a tangible link to the past. To some, a fragment is a tactile link to living memory. But to those who never knew, or had any association with the building, a fragment triggers the imagination to wonder about what it belonged to.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1603

The Impermanent City identifies a number of architectural fragments around Melbourne, and seeks to recreate from each remnant object its original sense of place. The exhibition does not aim to be a hand-wringing exercise in the destruction of, undeniably, some of Melbourne’s great landmarks and architecture, rather it explores the impermanent nature of the city and the ways we hold on to memories of it through remnant objects. The sense of loss associated with these buildings, and the feeling each fragment evokes is left to each individual to interpret and to determine.

THE EPHEMERAL ART OF HANNAH BERTRAM

A most unconventional artist in some ways, Hannah Bertram works not with paints, brushes and canvasses, but with the perishable, with empty space once occupied, and with the irreversible effects of time. In this she questions the value assigned to permanence and physicality.

For The Impermanent City Bertram presents us with a myriad of components located either within the Old Treasury or about the disintegrating cityscape, and that are either still in (temporary) existence or have already perished. Bertram enacts her work in the present tense, crafting her future ruins alongside concrete and intact structures, and in so doing, projects their future tense. Her work helps us think of history as an ongoing process of dislocation, as the built environment slowly collapses around us.

In Little Collins Street we witness pools of light on the footpath that have flooded out of windows and a doorway long since bricked up. The apertures belonged to a row of workers’ cottages, whose frontages remain, but whose roofs, floors and walls have been removed to make way for the Melbourne Club’s private park beyond. The wall retains the scars of one-time windows and doors – the only extant clues as to its earlier incarnation. The pools of light have been fathomed from dust, and within hours, they are gone.

Similarly, the facade of Ogg’s Pharmacy at 76 Collins Street will reappear in ghost-white dust during the exhibition. Passing pedestrians will be granted a temporary glimpse of the three-level Victorian terrace that once graced the sight, Back at the Old Treasury we witness a section of maroon carpet remade in dust on a raised plinth. While the Old Treasury still stands, the work reminds us that it too, is vulnerable, and is part of the constantly evolving state of Melbourne’s skyline.

Text © City Museum 2008

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For an exhibition catalogue, poster or complimentary brochure, please contact City Museum at Old Treasury.