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“architecture and urbanity: theory, insight and inspiration”

14/08/2011 Introduction: Rhizome [G. Deleuze & F. Guattari] | Networks and Fluids [J. Urry]

I speak in the square

and I speak in the circle

~Karl Telfer, Kaurna artist (Adelaide Plains)

On Monday landscape artist Gavin Malone and Kaurna culture bearer Karl Telfer, a self-described “black fella” from the Adelaide Plains region, presented a lecture for us on “An Aboriginal Adelaide.” Not surprisingly, Kaurna history and the particular brand of colonization deployed in South Australia is not unlike that instituted in early to modern Canada; it boasts a history of residential schools, abusive institutionalization, displacement, disease, cultural erosion and endemic social strife still witnessed today.

However, on one significant point the two colonies are distinct, and indeed South Australia is an exception to much of Australia, New Zealand and Canada in this respect as well. The Kaurna people do not have possession of a single square kilometre of traditional land in the Adelaide region, though many significant cultural places have been assumed by the colonial regime (the government house, state library, festival grounds, museum and art gallery all erected on a site sacred to the Kaurna). Institutions, as John Urry argues, “matter a great deal to how systems develop” (55).Like some Canadian First Nations peoples, the Kaurna were nomads, migrating from place to place within the region as seasons and needs changed, designating various sacred places throughout the land through ritual and landscape narrative not acknowledged by Colonel Light (head Architect of early Adelaide) as he carved his garden city.

I was moved by what Karl had to say not only because he spoke passionately, but because I feel this issue is incredibly complex, twisted, incomprehensible, and to a certain degree, irreparable, both here in Adelaide and at home. Nonetheless, it is not altogether surprising that these threads began to weave their way into my reading of the Deleuze and Guattari ‘s Introduction: Rhizome and to a lesser extent to Urry’s Global Complexities. Admittedly, these are rather dense and complex texts, but I think perhaps we can understand rhizomatic connections, multiplicities, and assemblages of intensities through the Kaurna / nomadic people’s experience and perhaps through them begin to appreciate integrated design systems that “plug” into not only economy and culture but social, political and ecological systems. D&G themselves write that the nomad is smooth, and that “what is lacking is a nomadology” (23); a portable, mutable, shifting ideology (“self-vibrating regions of intensity” [22]).

The Kaurna, like the rhizome, flow between two worlds; as Karl articulated, he “speaks in the square and in the circle”, proceeds “from the middle” (23), is the “conjunction” (25), the wasp and the orchid at once, in the ‘between’ of systems of thought. This is the place where Delueze and Guattari argue “things pick up speed” (25) where “lines of flight” (9), connection and departure, are possible. It is in the “arborification” of the rhizome– freezing the dynamism of the rhizome’s lines of flight, making the map a tracing, the rhizome a root system, the river a “fountainhead” (19), that we submit to a stasis, re-enact histories and perpetuate a finite–as opposed to an infinite–course. I am not entirely certain that I have made appropriate connections to fully articulate my course of thought and reflection, but I have provided a series of photographs to augment this position.