Sacred Places. Australia/Argentina
¨We belong to the land because Mother Earth feeds us and births everything…¨
(Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison – My people’s dreaming)
On the road. I slowly leave Riversdale behind. Bundanon Trust and the Sacred Mountain. This is what I feel: that there, in Riversdale, something sacred happened; a Sacred Ceremony. That’s the word I take back with me: Ceremony.
Uncle Max and the sacred land. And the ceremony of fire and smoke. Toc-toc. Toc-toc. The sound of the woods. The ritual. The ceremony. Honoring life and things. Honoring the drawings and the matter. The ritual of the hours and the peoples. All of this is what Bundanon Trust and Riversdale gave me.
The warm quick shower at dawn with the air touching my face and my eyes set towards the rising sun behind Boyd’s Hill. “Behold the mountain!!!” Rick Leplastrier said…Behold Life!! I would say too…
Here, on the road towards the Blue Mountains, Australia. So far, so near. Patagonia and New South Wales. The ‘guanacos’ and the kangaroos. More or less the same. Similar yet different. “Behold the mountain!!” Make it flesh within your being, make that landscape flesh in your eyes. All of this I take with me: seize the place. Look at architecture, and look at and comprehend the landscape to produce architecture. And dominate the technique. Dominate the craft and the technique: the angle of the summer and winter sun, the recycling of resources, the water from the roofs, and the wind, and the land. Comprehend the place and dominate the technique. With Poetry. And with Beauty.
One week at the Arthur and Ivonne Boyd Center in Riversdale participating in the Glenn Murcutt Master Class with the Australian Masters. An intense week of living with the Masters, with the landscape, and with thirty architects from other latitudes. Comprehending, in a very beautiful habitat with little comfort. More beauty and poetry than comfort, perhaps the reason for so much learning. So much essential concentration to reach the core. Concentration and Ceremony.
Here, heading down from Boyd’s Hill back to “civilization”. Coming down the sacred mountain with the teachings of the Master. Sunday, July 13th. About to encounter this week of work in Sydney with all it will bring.
Paula Herrero – July 2014.