A cantilevered cone at one end of the installation tapers to a viewing portal, one inspired by two very different masks: Venetian carnival masks and the horizontal eye slit in legendary bushranger Ned Kelly’s iron-armour helmet (and through this to Sidney Nolan’s engagement with the Australian landscape).

Somewhere Other has evolved from a link already made between Wardle, Venice and the Veneto region. In 2015 the studio was joint winner of the Australian Tapestry Workshop’s inaugural Tapestry Design Prize for Architects.  

The winning tapestry, Perspective on a Flat Surface, represented a contemporary response to Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vincenza and, in particular, the trompe-l’œil onstage scenery created by Vincenzo Scamozzi. A proposition to physically realise the abstract space of this tapestry was the initial point of exploration.

Statement by La Biennale di Venezia curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara.

We are fascinated by the fluency and freshness of the work of this practice. In our work with them for this exhibition we have seen the strong intellectual and creative thread which both liberates and directs them. We loved the theme of Somewhere Other presented. They quote D. H. Lawrence writing despairingly about Australia being “upside down at the bottom of the world”. We were very keen in this Biennale Architettura to reflect on this issue. How the world might be perceived differently from diverse parts of our planet?

The idea of reversing the Scamozzi trompe-l’œil street scenes in Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico as a means of focusing outwards and capturing an audience, as well as being cross-cultural, showed an openness and a wish to spatially engage with the visitor. They have constructed a series of three-dimensional lenses as a way of describing their view of the world from their particular location on the earth, using light, colour, craft, and the architectural elements of frames and portals.

We see these characteristics in their built projects, which show that feeling of continually manipulating space, zooming in and zooming out, even at the scale of infrastructure such as the beautiful Tanderrum Bridge.

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