Raquel Trapler

This project reimagines architecture as an embodied and performative practice that resists colonial, patriarchal and rational systems of control. Through fieldwork in Tullamarine’s peripheral landscapes of waste, infrastructure and neglect, I explore how the body can act as a tool of sensing and resistance. Using self-made devices, I transform documentation into performance, revealing how knowledge emerges through movement, friction and relation. This work proposes an architecture of care and reciprocity, one that listens to the overlooked spaces of the city and redefines how we know and inhabit the world.

This work explores the potential of image-making as a critical and reflective practice that challenges habitual ways of seeing. Through slow and layered processes, the images invite a more attentive mode of looking, positioning the act of viewing as one of thought rather than passive consumption. In resisting the speed and disposability of contemporary media culture, the work asks how visual production might instead foster awareness, care and accountability. It reflects on the cycles of excess and neglect that shape both images and materials, proposing a visual language that pauses within this flow to question how and what we consume.

Building on earlier investigations into embodied fieldwork and the politics of perception, these prints consider how processes of fragmentation and layering can translate spatial and bodily experience into visual form. Through abstraction and repetition, the images unsettle habitual ways of seeing, prompting attention to what is overlooked or obscured. Each print becomes both trace and transformation, echoing the performative gestures and temporalities of my fieldwork. In this sense, the work extends my broader inquiry into how material and visual processes can resist systems of control and open new ways of sensing and knowing space.