Murray-Darling Basin

Open to the elements, Murray-Darling Basin is a living translation of the Murray-Darling Basin made from organic materials. This map grows mould as it receives spores carried through the air. Changing in response to its location, it challenges conventions of cartography, which understands geography as static, passive and unchanging. Its existence highlights the futility of trying to impose qualities of permanence upon living things whose constitution is constantly in a state of flux.

Conservative and popular understandings of rural Australia see it as frozen in time and resistant to change. The environmental transformations happening to the Murray-Darling Basin as a result of extractive human activity, however, are very real. Weinstein reminds us that the Murray-Darling Basin is an infinitely complex and ever-changing ecosystem, that is alive and to which we must listen.

'Subjugating the work Murray–Darling Basin to time, is the point where the work stops being a simple projection of the physical place. The work becomes a Pinocchio of sorts, an uncontrollable organic body that cannot be tamed. Its mutation over time is affected by the site of the installation – heat, light, climate, biological organisms in the air and organisms emitted from the visitors’ bodies.'—Gal Weinstein