Copper Spur is a meditation on architectural transience in an extreme landscape. It is currently on display at the European Cultural Centre in Venice, Italy, as part of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennial. In this work, a Copper Spur tent that was carried on the Larapinta Trail in the Tjoritja West MacDonnell Ranges in central Australia is presented as a ritualized itinerant architecture. The Copper Spur was repetitiously unpacked, constructed, inhabited, deconstructed and re-packed on a daily basis over several weeks. It was a companion for the solo walker, cared for and carried over a long distance; a suggestive space that listened, spoke, recorded and constantly co-created place with its mobile inhabitant.

After its journey, the fabric floor of the tent now registers the landscape as a series of intense contact points that have been burnt into its surface. Key moments of compression –  the foot upon the path and the camp upon the earth amid the deep time of geology – are registered as disappearances that vanish into an elsewhere of irreversible change. Only the imagination of a tiny wisp of smoke from each perforation exists to recall the intense and enigmatic exchange of body, earth and architecture.