AA Prize winner Georgia Hablützel reflects on her Diploma projects and time at the school

Matthew Lloyd Roberts: Congratulations on winning the AA Prize for contributions to the AA community Georgia! You are part of Fluid Territories: The North Sea (Diploma 7), how did your project, ‘The Distant; Unsettled Land in Britain’ grow out of the unit brief?

Georgia Hablützel: The brief of the unit is a really interesting one because the unit acts as a framework for you to define a methodology. The year began with group work, and my group was looking at eroding land on the coast of Yorkshire. We went on a site visit along the Holderness coast, and we came across this strange lack of regulation; where land could erode, but farmers could continue to claim the same subsidies as when they were first registered. The Land Registry never took into account the fact that land mass changes. There was this strange discrepancy between the geology and the legality of privately held “productive” land. My project looks at how private farmland is categorised and incentivised in the UK through subsidies. It proposed moments to reintroduce the public’s right to roam within the boundaries of farmland, where erosion challenges farmland’s productivity. I’m looking at a projection of how time has an impact on the coastline of Britain, pre-empting the change in landmass through the collective right of public access.

MLR: So the project is based on that relationship between land and sea along the North Sea coast?

GH: In my technical studies I looked at access infrastructure, so the way that beach access has historically moved in a rudimentary way. Cranes would come and bring stairs, and move them ten metres inland, footpaths would turn into cantilevered bridge systems. I’m really interested in the tolerance of these infrastructures and forms of permanence. The project introduces an everlasting process of maintenance whilst challenging “productive” and “unproductive” forms of private ownership upon the changing landscape of Britain.

MLR: How has your thinking about these ideas developed over the course of your Diploma Studies?

GH: I was in Diploma 14 last year, and we were looking at gardens. My research looked at the town of Thetford and the forestry commission, investigating how forms of “commoning” could introduce a new relation to production in the British countryside at a horticultural level. I was interested in the legal and ritualised definitions of productive and unproductive land in the UK. A lot of the research from last year led to the investigations at the beginning of this year, and an abiding interest I’ve had in the production of imagery. This continuity contributed to a theoretical umbrella, my interest in landscape and the imagery of landscape today, something that my tutors were interested in, and they gave me the reins to dictate the limits of the project through the year, which was a really unique experience.

MLR: Your 5th year project has a very striking aesthetic, it really evokes those flat block colours of the Norfolk coast, how do you use images in your work?

GH: The project moves from Yorkshire to Norfolk, and when I first went to Norfolk in February, I was struck by the flatness of the land, and the way that you are constantly propelled forward into the line of the horizon. So the horizon in the project became the datum through every single drawing that I made afterwards.The images at the end, small animations, are taken from the point of view of a member of the public walking on these new pathways around the coast. Whereas the top-down axonometrics, look at how policies could be subverted to support a public's right to Roam along Private land. Because of the methods used to farm the British countryside, you understand the monoculture, the idea of a singular colour. So it was about trying to articulate that pared-back-ness of the English countryside, through flat plains of colour. A huge reference for me was the work of Susan Collins, her series ‘Seascapes’ or ‘Fenlandia’ speak to the impact of light on landscape and her images are a build up of pixels from webcams placed around the coast and inland of Britain. The work of George Shaw and Jacques Hondelatte also had a really significant impact on the project. I was interested in registration, the idea of a boundary of land being blurred by a path, and how that would be translated into a perspectival image. I was constantly trying to transform abstraction in landscape painting into axonometric, into the re-reading of policy, and finally these perspectival animations at the end of the project.

MLR: Lastly, what was it like to give the AA Prize speech to the school during the Virtual Graduation ceremony?

GH: I’m very self-conscious, and giving that speech was quite an uncomfortable thing because we’re really used to talking about our work and all of a sudden I had to speak about something that was really meaningful in front of hundreds of people. Through conversations with my friends I realised that we’ve become bogged down by this overload of virtual messaging. There was this amazing thing someone said to me about pausing, realising our intentions. That was hammered into me as an AA Foundation student. You always have to have intent behind the work that you make, it has to be directed somewhere, I felt that it is easy behind a computer to say whatever you want to say, but much harder to meaningfully engage with political causes and exchanges between each other. I wanted the speech to mark a moment of pause within the overwhelming reality of sitting behind a computer. Amy Glover, co-editor of AArchitecture, and I are trying to document all of the conversations that used to be held in the AA, within the next issue. Encouraging and supporting us to have those conversations virtually. I find myself feeling very nostalgic being behind a computer, I felt moved by the reality of what is going on right now, that was what the speech was trying to do in an honest way.

Georgia would like to add her deep gratitude to: DS, MSG, HK, PI, VBVB, WH, PVA, JC, AG, RJ

You can watch Georgia’s speech in the Virtual Graduation video.