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Cultural Reparations: The Subverted Restoration of Palace Westgarth Cinema

Part 2 Project 2024
Inneke Wagner
University of Melbourne | Australia
This thesis proposes the anachronistic medium of analogue photography to inform an architectural restoration of Palace Westgarth Cinema (John Seccull, 1921) to serve cultural reparations between Australia’s Settler-Colonial Culture and Wurrundjeri Woi Wurrung people and Country. The process of documenting the cinema as a filmic layer in Country provided an analogous heritage material to inform a technique of subversion, achieved through:
1. Multiple exposure – time blurring of image – architecturally informing a re-organization of the cinematic experience around an acknowledgement of Country.
2. Splicing – the cutting of film – achieved on site by merging public programme with the Cinema’s commercial programme.
3. Inversion – the state of viewing film in negative form – this is architecturally realised in an inversion of parts of the land title – giving space to Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Corporations to Manage First Nations cinema distribution and activity on site.

April 2024’s Yoorook Justice Commission Truth Telling hearings documented the suppressive agency of Melbourne’s heritage architecture on First Nations people and on Country. In response, this project seeks to demonstrate an alternative approach to redevelopment which connects First Nations cultural narratives with contemporary architectural history.


Tutor(s)

2024
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