ABSTRACT
If you can’t find the right surroundings it doesn’t matter where you are . . . Franco Forte, Melbourne, Australia, 24 June 19851
Who has read Vincenzo Volentieri’s 1951 migrant manifesto, The Unspeakability of Places? The answer is: no one. And for good reason. Volentieri was a Bicentennial hoax. On the eve of national celebrations, a journalist had asked one of Australia’s leading pundits, about Australian identity. To secure it, our pundit had replied, ‘a great creative genius’ was needed. So I obliged, inventing the aforenamed migrant architect, and describing his manifesto as an attack on the ‘cult of placism, which held that every place had its own individual spirit, which it was the artist’s task to paint, describe or, in the jargon of the time, “capture”’ (Carter 1992a: 151). Volentieri introduces my topic, then, in two ways: he champions a non-placist, characteristically migrant, technique of place-making, and he also hints at its character. A non-or anti-placist place-making begins in a critical and creative reflection on the myth of prescribed origins.
