Join Dado at Eclipse Cinema for the next Evenings with DADo screening: Architecton (2024) directed by Victor Kossakovsky. We’re delighted to be joined by Millie Cattlin and Joseph Norster from These Are The Projects We Do Together, who will introduce the film and reflect on how their work — particularly through The Quarry — resonates with the film’s exploration of material, landscape, extraction and collective making.
Title: Architecton (dir. Victor Kossakovsky, 2024)
Run Time: 98 mins
Languages: Italian, English
Please note the venue for this screening is at Eclipse Cinema:
32 Wellington St, Collingwood VIC 3066.
Architecton (2024) is an epic, intimate and poetic meditation on architecture and how the design and construction of buildings from the ancient past reveal our destruction – and offer hope for survival and a way forward.
Centering on a landscape project by the Italian architect Michele De Lucchi, the film reflects on the rise and fall of civilizations, capturing breathtaking imagery from the temple ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon, dating back to AD 60, to the recent destruction of cities in Turkey following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in early 2023.
Rock and stone connect the disparate societies, from ghostly monoliths stuck in the earth to tragic heaps of concrete rubble waiting to be hauled off and repurposed anew. Through director Victor Kossakovsky’s inquisitive lens, the grandeur and folly of humanity and its precarious relationship with nature posits the urgent questions: How do we build and how can we build better, before it’s too late?
These Are The Projects We Do Together is an interdisciplinary team operating creative spaces and designing and delivering a wide range of creative projects. Led by Millie Cattlin and Joseph Norster, the team has a hands-on approach with an attitude defined by generosity and caretaking towards community, infrastructure, local community and the public. They believe in the importance of public space, equally accessible to all. The practice is committed to developing experimental ideas in the fields of art, architecture and education through the design, programming and ongoing operation of Balam Balam Place and The Quarry.
Since 2016 These Are The Projects We Do Together has been working with an 86,000 sq metre Arkose Sandstone quarry in the Otway Ranges, within the traditional lands of the Gadubanud People. Located on the outskirts of the township of Beech Forest, the quarry sits on an east-west ridge line, 550 meters above sea level within a cool temperate rainforest climate.
As a post-extractive landscape, The Quarry requires rehabilitation. Typically, such sites are remediated to a ‘renaturalised’ state through either flooding or filling. These Are The Projects We Do Together explores rehabilitation as a creative process that is open-ended and involves bringing together different communities through a range of projects that build upon core rehabilitation tasks.
Evenings with DADo offer an intimate commingling of film and dialogues centred around diverse historical and contemporary stories of architecture, design, landscape and urbanism. Feature-length films, documentaries, shorts and animations all find a home in Robin Boyd’s living room at Walsh Street. Guest speakers contribute unique perspectives on the various film subjects, kicking off the conversation in a home that decidedly sought to reject convention.
Thandi Lane, Andrew MacKinnon, Tom Hibbert and Jasper Caverly present DADo’s 2026 program.
Image: Still from Architecton 2024.