In collaboration with Pa.LaC.E (Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds) who produced the CG visuals, this conceptual short film uses original graphics generated from 3d risograph drawings, corporate plans, and activist drone footage of fracking wells, to narrate the racism of Australian property laws that precede the ease of ‘unconventional extraction’ in the settler colony. The ‘Torrens Title’ property registration system, invented for the colonisation of Australia, was the first fully fungible capitalist model of landed property in the world. Invented by Robert Richard Torrens in 1858, a shipping officer with no legal training whatsoever, it based land on the model of autonomous, shipped property. It also removed the common law requirement to survey past histories of ownership at land sales. Today, the settler’s rights to private property are being toxified by fracking wells, while this most ‘efficient’ registry system has spread rapidly across the British Empire, and is now the dominant land management system globally, used by the IMF since the mid-2000s. The film draws on recent research on Torrens Title (Brenna Bhandar, Sarah Keenan and Renisa Mawani), white possession (Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Goenpul) and ongoing dialogues of The Gas Imaginary project with Gooreng Gooreng elders (esp. Juliri Ingra and Jackie Johnson), environmental and aboriginal activists and historians (esp. Roxley Foley, Gumbaynggirr).

CREDITS

RACHEL O’REILLY with PALACE (Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds) 

Drawing Rights 2018 

Editing: Sebastian Bodirsky 

Sound: Tyler Friedman

Advisory: Juliri Ingra (Gooreng Gooreng), Roxley Foley (Gumbaynggirr)

HD Video, colour, stereo, 17.09mins.

Commissioned by Frontier Imaginaries and the Van Abbemuseum.

PaLaCe – Benjamin Reynolds and Valle Medina

Palace is a collaborative practice that speculates and reacts to spaces of culture, space and economy. Benjamin Reynolds received a diploma with honours from the Architectural Association (AA) in London. He is currently a diploma tutor at the AA. Valle Medina is an architect and a recent graduate (summa cum laude) from the Applied Virtuality Theory Lab, Department of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ). They are currently visiting professors at ATTP in TU Vienna. http://palacepalace.com