![Sarah Rhodes, Ali Gumillya Baker, Anthony Coupe, Emily Paech and Julian Worrall. The team behind Unsettling Queenstown. Picture Tom Roe Sarah Rhodes, Ali Gumillya Baker, Anthony Coupe, Emily Paech and Julian Worrall. The team behind Unsettling Queenstown. Picture Tom Roe](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/184500760/619f6ef1-7156-48f7-a447-40878698e5a1.jpg/r0_0_2500_1667_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
An exhibition from a team including Tasmanian architects and artists was featured in the world's most prestigious architecture event in May - the Venice Architecture Biennale.
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Titled 'Unsettling Queenstown', the exhibition reflects on the town's remote landscape, colonial history and recent cultural revival.
Under the moniker of "Laboratory of the Future," the Venice biennale sought architectural ideas around the theme of decarbonisation and decolonisation.
Head of architecture and design at the University of Tasmania Julian Worrall said there was a lot of talk in architecture around decarbonisation, and ways of getting net-zero in buildings as a response to climate change.
"But we need to talk about decolonisation as well, which is a far more political and also ambiguous idea when it comes to architecture," Dr Julian Worrall said.
"The team that I was part of put up a proposal, 'Unsettling Queenstown', as a direct response to that challenge with the focus on the decolonisation aspect."
![The Belvedere Ghost, the centrepiece of Unsettling Queenstown. Picture Tom Roe The Belvedere Ghost, the centrepiece of Unsettling Queenstown. Picture Tom Roe](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/184500760/e16e66b9-0755-482c-a4cb-f54a990eca8c.jpg/r0_0_2500_1667_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
He said they felt Queenstown was "quite rich" in terms of its experience, its story and relationship to the land and environment.
"Also, the whole troubled history of Tasmania and its relationship to its Indigenous population," Dr Worrall said.
"The other aspect of course, is Queenstown has been enjoying a kind of resurgence in recent years on a different basis with increasing tourism and cultural activities."
He said it was fortuitous that the word "Queen" was involved, which hinted to Australian colonisation.
"It kind of encapsulated that idea there, but once we started doing more research, we did quickly find that there are many Queenstowns around the world ... several in Australia," he said.
The exhibition takes parts of different Queenstowns from around Australia, and out of it constructs a "hybrid or fictional Queenstown".
"We've looked at their history, environments and engaged with people with Indigenous backgrounds, and researched the language and place names there," Dr Worrall said.
But the centrepiece of the exhibition takes inspiration from the Empire Hotel in Tasmania's Queenstown.
"The second storey has this great balcony or terrace that overlooks the town and the mountain ... it's belvedere, or a structure built for taking a view," Dr Worrall said.
"What we did is we we took that element and abstracted it, rendered it like a kind of line drawing in three dimensions out of copper tubing and then suspended that in the space in the middle of the Australian pavilion in Venice."
He said the end result was a beautiful, but mysterious quality of a floating outline of a piece of a building.
"In the end the metaphor we settled on was that it was actually like a ghost that haunted our experience of places, and of Australian identity really ... like the ghost of colonialism," Dr Worrall said.
"We called it the Belvedere Ghost and it's the very centrepiece of the exhibition."
He said the owner of the Empire Hotel even offered to buy the sculpture and install it in Queenstown permanently.
"If that is realised that will be brilliant, but it'll be in Venice until the end of November," he said.
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