Isabella Etna

Supervisors: Alan Pert and Scott Woods

The six projects before you are not for the closed minded. They are archaeological artefacts, only visible and understandable through the narrator, an Emissary. It’s mandate is archeological, to journey to the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere to uncover memory and myth where significant temporal disturbance events have occurred and have been forsaken. It's task is to reconstruct fact and fiction to produce an alternate vision of the sites, partly real and surreal. The 20th Century Venetian-Sicilian Master Architect Giuseppe Samoná’s interest is aligned to the Emissary’s mandate, where Samoná took an interest in creating a spatial landscape of mythologies, ancient truths and mysteries that reside uniquely in the knowledge of place. Samoná was unable to fully realise the ambition of this theoretical impulse in a select number of his projects. The Emissary’s visions are a series of constructions to reconstruct Samoná's architectural projects in the locations of the temporal disturbance sites. The logic of the Emissary is also supplemented by the writings of the architectural critic and historian Manfredo Tafuri, a contemporary of Samoná, who was able to translate, interpret and deliver the message of Samoná’s theoretical impulse, just as the Emissary is on a mission to imagine an alternative expression for the six sites. The Emissary’s ‘Manual of Instructions’ to interpret it’s visions is below.

For a complete project reading please visit my Virtual Model (on at.studio)

An Emissary is deployed to retrieve the memory of historical but forsaken geographies and to construct a new fiction in their place, an architecture of the predicament of living on the edge of an abyss.

The emissary's endeavour is solely archeological. On it’s time-space trajectory it has located two significant temporal disturbance events forsaken in history. The Dredging of Port Phillip Bay and the Eruptions & seismicity of Mount Etna.