The Suez Canal: An Excavation

Jury statement

The jury commended this project for its speculation about how to draw and make a rich landscape exhibition and its approach to the larger landscape of the Suez Canal. The entry explored landscape infrastructure issues and design strategies through an innovative adoption and appropriation of Bawa’s and Mathur / da Cunha’s techniques. The jury applauded the entry for its connectivity between the production of landscape representation and the generation of design.

The entry makes explicit how the creation of “drawings” for the exhibition through beading, stitching, stretching, peeling, layering and binding informed and generated the operative techniques for landscape infrastructure. The entry conveys the complexity of the densely coded Suez Canal landscape in tactile and tangible ways. It blends measures of water quality and landscape ecologies with pragmatic yet poetic approaches to canal infrastructure. This entry was a standout among many and the jury commends the author for her engagement with a large-scale landscape and her inspiring modus operandi.

Project description

This studio required research into two practitioners, Geoffrey Bawa and Mathur / da Cunha, and a nominated site with the production of a 3D exhibition piece. The proposal explores theories of resilience with the application of new presentation techniques. From the outset, all work was completed in 3D and the stitching, hand beading, painting and collection as narrative were used to consider process as methodology. It is about in-depth investigation leading to distillation and then response and finally re-presentation and curation for exhibition.

If you turn a delta into a drain and if you bleed a river dry to keep a canal in operation, how do you keep the water sweet for the communities of the “in between” who use these places as food sources?

The proposition is the use of swamps and feeders to filter.