Immigration Place

A nationally significant commemorative place in the Parliamentary Zone in Canberra.

• Investigators

  • • Professor Callum Morton
    Monash Art, Design and Architecture

• Co-investigators

  • • Professor Nigel Bertram
    Monash Art, Design and Architecture
  • • Charlotte Day
    Curator
  • • Bob Earl
    Oculus
  • • Paul House
    Ngambri Custodian
  • • Nikos Papastergiadis
    Writer, Theorist
  • • Daniella Trimboli
    Writer, Theorist

• Undertaken within

  • Monash Art Projects

There is an exceptionally lyrical and powerful quality to this proposal that fascinates, provokes interest and demands exploration. The sculptural expression presented interprets and melds immigration with our indigenous history and looks forward to a progressive Australian future.

Immigration Place Jury

Immigration Place aspires to be a place where Australians and visitors can reflect on and celebrate our migrant history and the contribution of immigrants and immigration to our nation’s community and culture. It will be a meeting place, a focus for collecting and sharing stories and a place of welcome for migrants and new citizens.

Migration is a highly complicated and affectively fragmented experience. For all the many happy and affirmative migration stories one can also frequently describe migration experiences as unsettling and difficult, sometimes even traumatic.

We express this layered and fragmented story of migration in a range of symbolic ways.

In plan our proposal can be approached from a number of key points from the outside, across a field of native grasses. Once inside these break into multiple, rippling pathways that wind around the striated womb like columns and shallow pools of water and landscape. As one moves through the space a proliferation of tiny speakers inside the structure quietly broadcast spoken word recordings of the collected migration stories. The alternately spaced layers of steel used to build the form, echoes both the density of migration experiences and indeed is a graphic illustration of the accumulation of these stories in the National Archive.

Our Immigration Place proposal is simultaneously an elusive object, a poetic immersive environment and a dynamic celebratory gathering place.