University of Auckland student Edward Ge won the Student Award at the 2019 Interior Awards with his project The Reconcile, which the judges called “a poetic and highly emotive project”.

The project was a response to Ge’s grandmother’s passing and the question about whether to keep her ashes in New Zealand or her ancestral land of China. Ge explains, “As the matriarch of a migrant family, my grandmother was a part of a diasporic movement that both sought to create an authentic sense of belonging in a place away from one’s birth land but also carried with them memories which provided deep ties to their ancestral roots.

“Through two ritual spaces embedded into the Nihotupu Dam and Spillway, this project is dedicated to my grandmother’s passing earlier this year in Auckland – a home away from her ancestral home – proposing a ‘Columbaria of Memories’ that not only memorializes a migrant’s new roots created here in New Zealand, but also diaspora’s performative dimension for a posthumous repatriation of memories back to an ancestral homeland.”

Full jury citation:

Edward Ge captured the judges’ attention with a poetic and highly emotive project. The Reconcile was born from a dilemma about where Edward’s family was to keep his late grandmother’s ashes: either in her homeland (China) or in her adopted home (New Zealand). From this, Edward devised a conceptual project aimed at bringing closure to migrant families who find themselves in similar situations. He imagined a stunning building for a series of nonreligious, repatriation rituals where topography and the built environment work in tandem to carry through a metaphor of belonging and separation, of distance and homemaking.

In an era constantly threatened by divisiveness along cultural lines, this project seeks the opposite: healing through interiors. The Reconcile was a project the judges wished to see come to fruition and whose maker was unanimously commended.

See Edward’s winning presentation here:

See the full list of winners from the 2019 Interior Awards here.

Purchase your copy of the June 2019 issue of Interior magazine here for extended Awards coverage.

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