The Reconcile

Abstract

This thesis explores a personal design practice that seeks to reconcile a sense of place and the notion of belonging with the realities of diaspora. Following the boom of highly-skilled migrants in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly from Asia, with the majority being young professionals who had chosen to come for a change in lifestyle, there currently exists a splintering of identities within the diasporic inhabitants of New Zealand whose identities are partially shaped by their relations with the homeland, represented by their family or culture, or by their country or government. The only commonality that exists amongst them is the strong presence of their individual memories, which provide phenomenological ties to their ancestral roots. Described as “place-based” not “place-bound” by Anne-Marie Fortier, often these memories undermine the geographical definitions of diaspora and the idea that the lost homeland is the defining moment of diasporic identity. These memories splinter into different threads of continuity, many of which no longer have any connection with the homeland, resulting in the very placelessness felt by many diasporic inhabitants. Travelling within my personal memories as a Chinese New Zealander, I explore a design and theoretical language that culminates in the final project, which consists of two architectural dualities: A gateway and a repository that are concerned with the death of these migrants abroad, and their families’ sense of placelessness as they are faced with often conflicting issues of posthumous treatment. Rooted in both the physical locality of New Zealand where I am a designer, and in a place within my memory where I am the inhabitant, the gateway and repository not only provide a permanent burial of memories with their loved ones away from their original soil where they have grown new roots but they also explore diaspora’s performative dimension for a posthumous repatriation, an act of ‘returning to the soil’, completing the cycle of a spiritual return and the reunion of the fragmented memory.