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Aram Mooradian
Diploma 6

Aboriginal dreamtime narratives speak of a time when the ground was soft and creation beings shaped mountains and rivers. Now the financial narratives of gold prices reshape the earth through massive excavations and technological incisions. The Atlas of Gold Fictions catalogues the strange infrastructures of the gold economy, from its source in the mines of Australia to the web of precious artefacts scattered across the globe. Aram, of our Future Archaeologies Department, has reimagined the infrastructure of gold’s solely virtual value through the speculative artefacts of a new network of gold objects inscribed with the oral histories of the land from which it came. A suicide note is inscribed on a single gold bullet, the sound of a grandmother’s laughter is encoded into an heirloom necklace and the dying languages of Australia’s indigenous culture are recorded onto the gold bars dug out of the very ground of their homeland. Our relationship to our finite resources is re-examined with this new dispersed geology of artefacts encoded with the cultural rather than economic values of the contemporary world.

Songlines are the commodity of the aboriginal - they are oral histories, origin mythologies and geographical maps encapsulated in sound.The suicide bullet of Hunter S. Thompson encodes his last words. Engraved on to its contours is his message to his wife, Anita. Football Season is over.What begins in the fiery furnace of a supernova takes on various forms and is scattered across the globe as it continually absorbs our stories.The gold room where lumps of metal are stored untouched under ground is transformed into a field of threads that store the songlines of the landscape that was destroyed in gold's extraction. A system developed for the protection of virtual financial values now simultaneously protects intangible ones.Racks of gold threads wound around reels become not only a new storage system for the gold bar, but an archive of oral histories.The drawings that Aboriginals sketch in the sand to communicate their oral histories exist for only moments. Here, the crudeness of those momentary drawings is captured with molten metal, where a drawing of a landscape of mining value is captured in new artefacts. As big machines, pumps and valves invade the Never Never, new monsters are born in aboriginal dreamtime stories.The death of a star gives birth to our gold.The Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions catalogues and documents the forms and values of our relationship to our most precious resource. Truths are redefined and fictions are re-articulated.Architecture for the End of the World brings you this 24 Carat gold pendant player - suitable for playing most engraved pendants and rings. Remember the voices of your loved ones and your most precious memories.