Curator Statement - Dr SueAnne Ware AILA
The 2009 Melbourne AILA National Conference aims to interrogate practice.
The theme of this Conference is forward thinking, it asks how our professions must shift in order to adapt to and consider a world of increasing complexity. This National Conference also recognizes that it is timely to change how we deal with the conundrum of practice and intellectual research in landscape architecture.
A conference is a means to convene … This AILA National Conference aims to debate the theoretical ideologies and the pragmatic realities of contemporary practice in mutually inclusive ways. This essay is written in the spirit of provocation in anticipation of the conference event. It seeks to stimulate discussion and to confront the indifference that often influences our response to pressing cultural and ecological challenges. Quite simply, this essay intends to create a bit of friction and provoke the AILA community to act and to contribute to this meeting in new and unexpected ways.
Professional conferences are difficult affairs. They involve the complex task of providing a range of ideas and speakers to fit a diverse and divergent community. The profession of landscape architecture has and will continue to develop a range of ‘practices.’ This is evidenced in AILA’s attempt to define these practices in a recent directions paper. http://www.aila.org.au/directions
While AILA’s list is incomplete; including such practices as landscape planning, landscape ecology and urban design, and may arguably be easily contested, it bears out my point, that ‘national’ conferences aiming to discuss issues relevant to ‘the profession’ simply cannot address the entirety or breadth of landscape discourse on practice.
The 2009 National Conference therefore aims to establish the materialization of new and shifting territories in order to challenge landscape architectural practice in Australia, and in so doing question its future directions, within an international context. The profession’s historical claim to working at the nexus of art, culture, and nature, and its dual roles of steward and collaborator are interrogated. and we also ask what it means to practice landscape architecture in the 21st century in the global south? Contributors will be encouraged into robust debate regarding the relevance of established and emergent practices operating in a climate of global economic, environmental and cultural change.
We are inundated with rhetoric, often self-generated, about this being the time for landscape architects to take a leading role in re-shaping our built environments. With this in mind I believe the conference committee has structured this National Conference to encourage discussion and debate as an imperative for intellectual provocation through speaking, demonstrating through example and informed reflection. We need you, the audience to contribute to the conference beyond just listening. We seek not a one-way exchange of ideas. We propose that customary professional politeness to be set-aside in the service of recognizing emergent practices and towards inventing new agendas, and we encourage noisy debate.
Our invited presenters are there to challenge the audience! They will engage us in a critical dialogue through what they do and explicate why their practices are important to our profession and its future. They are here to speak critically about their own work and the work of others. At the very least they will challenge us, provoke us, and make us think differently about our work and the products of our professions. At the very least they will expect generous engagement from their audience in return.
Dr SueAnne Ware AILA
AILA National Councillor ~ 2009 Conference Convener
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture
Architecture & Design
RMIT
>> link to RMIT
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