In 2011, Burnside Shopping Centre in the leafy eastern suburbs of Adelaide completed its upgrade and opened to the public. At the centre of the atrium in the mall was a 100 year-old protected river red gum that couldn’t be removed. Attempts were made to keep the tree alive, first by providing a canopy of windows, and later through misting sprays and nutrient injections. Within two years, the tree was dead. Perhaps as an act of resistance, the tree simply refused to comply. What does this say about the hubris of property developers? And more broadly, about the anthropocentric desire to bend ‘nature’ at will? The co-existence of a mature tree and a shopping mall couldn’t seem more different, but what if we were to rethink nature as part of our lived and built environment, as Stephen Vogel suggests in Thinking Like a Mall (2015).

This short speculative documentary takes as its starting point eco-feminist theories such as Haraway’s naturecultures (2003) and Harris and Holman Jones’ manifesto on posthuman creativity (2022) alongside Tsing’s offering of the inter-relations between human and environment as ‘polyphonic assemblages’ (2015). Weaving together stories and constructions of different built and native environments, City’s New Malls uses composited 3D LiDAR scans, produced on an iPad, to create a protopian vision of the shopping mall. These spaces speculate on posthuman agency and the capacity to subvert consumerist spaces  into new assemblages of cohabitation. 

Commissioned by Australian Environments on Screen and MINA