Jacob Raupach: Folding the Periphery

Folding the Periphery traces the 960km expanse of rail corridor between Sydney and Melbourne, examining liminal spaces along the line that house and support extractive industries and link them to the global economic market. Mapping these in-between spaces, Folding the Periphery condenses and collapses the complex material, economic and industrial relationships between regional and metropolitan areas into a mesh of images, videos and sculptures within the gallery space.

The arrogant conceit of the cyber-economy, for that matter of the very idea of the postindustrial era, is that we disavow our dim but nagging awareness that nearly all energy – whether converted to electricity or derived from direct combustion – comes from oil or other hydrocarbon fossil fuels, or from fissionable uranium refined from yellow-cake ore: solids, liquids, and gases that are extracted from the earth and transported in bulk.

—Allan Sekula, Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs) 2002, pg. 33