Reduce Speed

Our roads are constantly being repaired, extended and altered. The M2 in Sydney’s north is experiencing dramatic urban change. Nighttime road works involves massive floodlights, flashing lights, bright red cones, orange trucks, barriers, fluoro-clad workers, isolated from the traffic driving by. Intense lighting creates dramatic scenes of man, machine and earth. Mysterious, man-made landscapes challenge clichés of unspoiled, sublime scenery. The scale of man/machine to gorged out rock is a focus, the workers neither incidental nor central. These non-places or second geographies, are the largely unseen machinery of urban consumer cultures. We may pass them daily but we don’t see these points in the biography of everyday things and work environments.