Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize (National)

Jialin Wu, Master of Landscape Architecture graduate at RMIT is the co-recipient of the 2021 Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize.

The Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize identifies and shares the finest graduating projects produced in landscape architecture education across the country. Australian universities each nominate a student based on their end-of-year presentation. The projects are then blindly reviewed by an independent jury, which awards one student the national prize.

The jury commends Vanishing Landscape for its "immense ambition and scope in thinking through the relationships between contemporary issues, including climate change, marginalization and the pandemic, across oscillating scales of time and space. The project proposal pushes boundaries in terms of the way we think about these topics and opens up new avenues for discourse."

Jialin Wu

Vanishing Landscapes

How can ‘vanishing’ of material matter act as stealth activism to reveal the hidden trauma on Hart Island and claim social justice inflicted by systemic flaws in the American society?

From colonialism to capitalism, from white supremacy to heteropatriarchy , antagonism endangers the right of the vulnerable and exacerbates inequality in cities. Islands become convenient spaces for authorities to hide the unwanted. Hart Island, New York’s largest mass burial ground for marginalised groups, is one of these forbidden places. The impact of global emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have brought the unresolved and continuing violation of marginalised communities into the spotlight.

Adopting principles of military tactics, the project proposes a framework for stealth activism, which superficially cooperates with the government, while intrinsically acting as a parallel memorial system that claims the right of the deceased.

Based on a non-linear timeline, Vanishing Landscape unfolds the potential of the cemetery island through vanishing processes to reveal the fluidity of life and death. From visibility to invisibility, from solid to particles, from antithesis to integration, the institutionalised truth is replaced with a perpetual dialogue in movement.

Within the contrived vanishing process, the work speaks up against the multifaceted violence of marginalisation, offering an invitation for a shared resistance against the binary system that rooted in the antagonism.

In 2021 Dr. Alice Lewis and Jen Lynch were coordinators of Project A + B, and Dr. Heike Rahmann was Jialin’s tutor.