Murray River Maps, Tidal Garden, McMillan Road Studio, Water Theatre - Curated by Jaewon Cho & Sand Helsel

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RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Mobile Landscapes (III) was developed as a new key project for the curatorial theme 'Ephemeral Architectures' for the X-Field Archive (as part of the exhibition "Neighbouring Effect", Seoul, Korea, and for subsequent iterations). Mobile Landscapes is a mapping of the Murray River, building upon several years of archival research of its flood histories. It comprises: a line drawing of the 2500-kilometre river system (15 A4 sheets of drafting film), and 15 photographic recordings (each A6 format) of a 24 kilometre walk undertaken (in 2001) across the '1956 floodplain'. The line drawing shows the existing river, the shoreline of a 1:100 year flood event (1956) and the survey grids of existing river towns.

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: The major contribution is within the scholarship of site studies in architecture, and has particular relevance as an approach to uncovering invisible site histories. This knowledge is useful in the design process as it can help the architect engage with ephemeral site phenomena as a site specific design approach.

RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: The exhibition was curated by designer Jaewon Cho and Associate Professor Sand Helsel (RMIT). It was funded by the Arts Council in Korea, the Australia - Korea Foundation, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This project has led to several invited public lectures: at the University of Siegen, Germany, the University of Sint-Lucas, Ghent, Belgium, and at the Affirmative Architecture Conference in Melbourne and Perth. Black was invited by Curtin University, Perth, to present the annual keynote Robertson Memorial Lecture. The exhibition received peer review in SPACE magazine: Architecture, Art and Culture journal, Korea.