The title of the 2021 Festival of Landscape of Architecture, “Spectacle and Collapse: Changing Landscapes,” seemed somewhat ironic for a conference in relatively “normal” Perth to those of us watching on from cities still in lockdown. The relevance of the title – derived from Guy Debord’s 1967 Marxist critique The Society of the Spectacle – remained understandably ambiguous during the conference, often referred to but never resolved, which could also be said of the issues that the conference sought to address, including the relationship of nature and landscape to ubiquitous media and climate change. Located in magnificent Kaarta Koomba (Kings Park), the conference had a peculiarly Westralian vibe and was characterized by a particularly broad range of disciplines and topics addressing the overall theme.
The “international keynote” is a normal feature of a design conference in Australia, where the antipodean locals learn from those in the “old world.”
