Gejin Song, Staging The Orchard [×]

The project proposes the interior as a staged space which has the potential to draw attention and enhance experience. Staging of a specific activity and space produces a deep impression which can inform people to be aware of something otherwise ignored. The research explores ideas of staging and immersing to shift and create awareness through techniques of performing, lighting, framing, hanging, reflecting, raising, with material arrangement, material transformations and spatial proximities.
Two pavilions are situated at Rayner’s Orchard, in the Yarra Ranges, an hour from Melbourne. Each pavilion is connected to site yet activated separately according to the change of the seasons. A Summer Pavilion and Winter Pavilion produce a spatial relationship to the existing environment by allowing the visitor a new scenic experience. Each pavilion frames and elevates the orchard as a situation and ecology of seasonal and environmental conditions and functions.
The Summer Pavilion is an open and elevated walkway which intervenes into an existing pathway often travelled for the visitors’ tour raised off the ground plane, staging the orchard from above it provides a new relationship to the horizon line and re-presents the orchard.
The Winter Pavilion provides more shelter and offers a platform for visitors to experience the orchard in closer proximity, to pause and interact with the fruit of the orchard. There is a contrast between the two pavilions, whilst also a progression.
With an underlying interest in food sourcing and ethical eating, the research is also concerned with the orchard as a situation where food is considered part of a greater environmental context, system, and ecology. The project explores how seasonality can be staged to shift awareness concerning eating. Staging The Orchard employs poetic and performative techniques intending to stimulate and inform an understanding of the processes involved in food production.