Projected City is a critical exploration of Canberra’s brutalist architecture and the ambitious ideas that shaped the national capital. Emerging from a belief in modernism, order, and progress, these buildings embody the optimism of a planned city designed to express civic identity through bold, monumental forms. Yet this film also interrogates the tensions at the heart of this vision. Many of the ideological, political, and social ambitions that drove Canberra’s design were diluted over time, leading to compromise, neglect, and, in some cases, failure. It examines how buildings once conceived as symbols of a progressive future now sit uneasily within a changing city, their material deterioration mirroring the erosion of the ideas that produced them.

Created with Localjinni's Fiona Hooton and Catrina Vignando, the film is a colourful concoction of projection, animation and the built environment. The film features photographs taken by participants of a workshop I tutored at PhotoAccess in 2023, and additional images by Catrina Vignando and Maryanne Humphreys.

Finalist in the experimental category at the Canberra Short Film Festival in 2024.