photography
Grandeza Studio & La Biennale
di Venezia
Pilbara Interregnum:
Seven Political Allegories
For Grandeza Studio’s video installation commissioned by the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Clelia was contracted to produce, photograph, edit and deliver documentation images.
About the project:
The Pilbara is an immense, arid, and thinly populated territorial crust in the north of Western Australia. Since the first colonial incursions, just 160 years ago, the progressive ‘discovery’ of its rich mineral deposits has transformed the region into a spatiotemporal battlefield of expulsions, explosions, and exploitation, papered over by the colonial ‘development’ myth. In fact, despite its label as ‘the powerhouse of the nation’, the Pilbara still suffers from significant infrastructural underdevelopment and high rates of racialised social exclusion.
Pilbara Interregnum, Grandeza Studio’s contribution to The Laboratory of the Future, takes the opportunity offered by the current energetic paradigm shift to put in crisis the extractivist, colonial, and capitalist mythologies that are turning this region, and the rest of the planet, into sacrificed areas. A constellation of seven political allegories re-stage the Pilbara by moving it away from a resources-extraction battlefield into an epistemological war of political imagination.
