Background
Our practice has been working with an old sandstone quarry in the Otway Ranges in the town of Beech Forest, within the lands of the Gadubanud people, since 2016.
The quarry is currently undergoing rehabilitation. From the outset we have been interested in ways of thinking about rehabilitation as a creative process — elaborating on and testing through the various tasks associated with the rehabilitation plan. These tasks include making the landforms stable and safe, removing invasive species while improving soil condition and creating a productive place for future activities.
The long-term goal is to establish a productive site with facilities to accommodate study and research groups, creative projects and residency programs.
We are particularly interested in developing and supporting projects and activities that consider the history of the region, that work with the geology and form of the post extractive landscape, and that directly engage with our local communities.
Information
Held in February 2023 at The Beech Forest Quarry, the first Quarry Pedagogies Summer Camps were invitation-only and free to attend, with transport, food and accommodation provided.
Camp participants (70 in total) spent five nights from Sunday to Thursday investigating key themes of rehabilitation through education as well as self-initiated projects on site.
The aim of the project was to bring people together to investigate notions of pedagogy through place, land rehabilitation, ecology at the edge, and forms of regenerative culture.
Visit theprojects-quarry.com
Camp Program
The future requires rehabilitation.
The camp program was essentially about rehabilitation: how we work with rehabilitation as a process and a program, and how we propose an alternative mode of rehabilitation that, instead of filling or flooding the quarry, considers other approaches and outcomes.
The Quarry, as a former extraction landscape and current rehabilitation project, raises a range of themes and questions about our relationship to land. We were interested in unpacking the idea of rehabilitation, and shifting from extraction to care.
Program activities during the camp were informed by a series of prompts. These prompts come in in the form of tools, materials, questions, themes and readings that each in different ways related to rehabilitation.