Our Layered City: Subterranean Auckland

Abstract

Our Layered City: Subterranean Auckland deals with the relationship between the underground, film and time. Man’s historic preoccupation with using the underground as a source of protection as well as a place to conceal necessary yet undesirable structures within the city will be investigated as a key to intervention. In the process, these interventions will emphasise the layered nature of the site. The subterranean preserves, it has the ability to encapsulate the forgotten, it holds the potential to exist outside of recognizable patterns of time, and the act of digging draws us closer to unveiling the original layers of the urban palimpsest. Indeed, time gives landscape a vertical dimension, in that “digging down into the earth is also going back into the past”.1 Gilles Deleuze once recognised a connection between the two seemingly unrelated themes of time and film, through a concept which Deleuze referred to as the time-image, which “goes beyond the purely empirical succession of time – past-present-future.” 2 This concept of non-linear narrative allows us to “explore time- to open it up, pull it back, and reveal the inner workings of a single moment.”3 Auckland’s history will be explored so as to allow our past, present and future to spill into one-another. The subterranean is a world where time can be imagined beyond the constraints of the linear. From a subterranean perspective, film serves as a bridge to accessing forgotten underground spaces. Film has the ability to transport the viewer to places which otherwise may be off-limits. With particular focus placed on the Albert Park Air Raid Tunnels, this project aims to open up the subterranean to be discovered by all, a project for the city. In doing so, it will ask how our city’s forgotten subterranean spaces could be regenerated, in order to speak of our past and ultimately become relevant for the future of our city. 1 Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, c2008), 23. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time-Image trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone, 1989), xii. 3 Doug Aitken, Broken Screen: 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken: expanding the image, breaking the narrative (New York, NY: D.A.P./ Distributed Arts Publishers; London: Thames & Hudson distributor, 2005), 12.