This longitudinal project began with the creation of a 3-metre long fracture in a concrete slab located in Melbourne's CBD (1 City Rd, Southbank, Australia, VIC 3006) using an axe, pick, jackhammer, and rotating saw. The 1 City Road block is the site of the former YMCA headquarters building that was demolished in 1983 after it sustained damage as a result of the construction of the Arts Centre and Concert Hall. The land was acquired by the State of Victoria as Crown Land and remained vacant up until 2013 and in 2022 was announced as the site for a new National Gallery of Victoria Contemporary (NGC Contemporary) gallery.

Initially titled ‘wilder’, it was conceived as an exploration of the potential of unsuppressed nature and land management in urban spaces: the fracture site was to provide an intentional and calibrated breaking point in the blanket of bitumen and concrete that covers the city, where nature would be given free license to grow wild without intervention. Within this conception of the project, the breaking of the concrete was simply considered a means to an end (i.e. it is necessary to break the concrete to expose soil in which vegetation can grow). However, in the early stages of planning for the ground breaking the project shifted to focus on the implications of the act of breaking a section of a concrete slab on Crown Land.

However, a second line of enquiry emerged through practice; the complex relationship that the outcomes of the physical action (the fracture created in the concrete slab) have with permanence. Eventually site ownership where the fracture is located will be transferred and the process of constructing a building at this location will commence. As a result of construction activities, the space acted on will be subjected to the actions of development and thus undergo a material transformation (i.e. disruption and destruction).

The research and creative outcomes of the project focus on jointly engaging with these two lines of enquiry through a combination of action and legal frameworks; the breaking of the concrete slab, and a certificate that defines and substantiates the work’s physical parameters and function as a sculptural/spatial artwork (its legal objecthood) so to establish the work with a set of rights. The new title ‘Three phases of a monument’ was adopted.

The action certification also sets forth the conditions under which the work operates both in the present as well as when the site is subject to destruction;

(a) any process that results in the destruction of the fracture constitutes a secondary artistic act that shall, without exception, become part of the work, and

(b) any subsequent building erected at the Site following the destruction of the fracture shall also constitute a secondary material expression of the work.

Thus, once construction of the NGV Contemporary building is completed, it will become the architectural sculpture and absorbed into the work. From there, a certificate of transfer will be established that will offer all rights, including intellectual, creative and authorship, to the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Traditional Custodians on which the work is placed.

Engaging dialogues of land ownership (both historical and contemporary), land rights and cycles of land dispossession from Indigenous peoples, the work considers modes of the repossession of traditional lands by Traditional Custodians within the Australian urban context, as well as the structures that now occupy them. Over time, the work is inherently bracketed by developments or further limitations of rights and justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.