Extreme weather events have occurred in Australia for millennia. The history of spatial decision-making since colonisation has been the fortification against their effects. This effort has been made in concert with the foundational violence of the colony: the dispossession of Indigenous Australians of their land and connection to Country and the suppression and destruction of Indigenous cultures and laws, including the intentional burning of Country. At the same time, since the late twentieth century, these extreme weather events have been deepened and exacerbated by anthropogenic forcing. Overwhelmingly, the response has been new architectures and spatial policies that entrench, rather than challenge, that foundational violence, even as many the effects of these processes continue to work beyond certain limits of sensibility. Working within the broader context of the Climate Rights project at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, this project will unpick the connections between climate, coloniality, sensibility, and space through different typologies of fire across the east coast of Australia and the Gulf of Papua. Its first line of inquiry will be the lens of obscuration and obscurity – which are both precursors to and the consequences of fire – before considering modes of intervention in fire’s place between visual culture and law.
Oskar Frederick Johanson is an architectural designer, writer and educator. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Climates Rights program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Since 2021, he has been co-program head of the AA Visiting School Sydney. From 2021-22 he was an Agent of Change for the 10th Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, in which capacity he undertook and presented research on the Australian beach. From 2020-21 he was a Research Fellow at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, where he also taught, with a focus on maritime spaces. He has taught short courses at the AA, UCL, Cambridge, the University of Melbourne, and Iowa State University. He has written for AA Files, The Avery Review, and The Sydney Morning Herald, among others. His research on cruise ships in the Caribbean was recently featured in The Architecture of Staged Realities, an exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, and at L'architecture des réalités mises en scène: (re)construire Disney, an exhibition at arc en rêve, Bordeaux.
This presentation will introduce the context, preliminary work, and projected lines of inquiry of the PhD research. It will cover recent field work undertaken within the Climate Rights project, including aerial and ground-based documentation and 3D reconstruction of the impacts of climate change in the Gulf of Papua, and highlight a few key artefacts of colonial visual culture in colonial east Australia and the southwest Pacific insofar as they bear on the project’s core investigation.