It was designed to be destroyed, the same fate as those places for which it stood, erased from the cultural landscape of our city.
It began with a most improbable observation—‘skate arena’ is an anagram of ‘arsen atake’—close enough to ‘arson attack’ to make the point, and improbable because of the burning of Red Hill Skate Arena. This prompted renewed interest in other lost buildings, and so a grave was made, their names reverently carved in their original fonts on a massive headstone.
The other side was defaced, the names mashed, to tell their stories like graffiti’d propaganda as a back drop to live acts; performers provocatively dancing on the grave.
Its legacy is a large collection of sympathy cards. Adjacent to the grave, visitors were invited to write to the family (all of us) of the deceased (places past).
Whilst many wrote of the passing of ‘usual suspects’, others wrote of places of architectural ‘insignificance’, and some reflected on the incomparable dispossession experienced by First Nations Peoples.
Collectively, the cards are a reminder of the complexity surrounding what is considered ‘precious’ in the world, an essay on the cultural effects of physical discontinuity and the effects of ‘inevitable change’.
