Redaction, Absence, Opacity: Architectural witnessing of Australia's hotel detention network

Redaction, Absence, Opacity examines Australia's use of hotels as sites of immigration detention, focusing on a network of facilities concealed through both their everyday appearance and bureaucratic redaction. Operating as "Alternative Places of Detention" (APODs), these sites are embedded within ordinary urban environments, their carceral function obscured by familiar architecture and limited public visibility.

Drawing on Freedom of Information documents, open-source investigations, and spatial reconstruction, this exhibition assembles fragments of evidence to document how this network operates as a largely hidden infrastructure. Through drawing, mapping, installation, and photography, the exhibition traces the transformation of hotels into spaces of confinement while exploring the challenges of representing systems that are deliberately obscured.

Rather than seeking to produce complete or transparent accounts, the work engages with absence, opacity, and redaction as both subject matter and method. These visual and spatial conditions become tools for documenting what remains concealed, revealing how acts of erasure shape public understandings of detention. By reconstructing the architectural traces of these sites and their operations, the exhibition considers how creative spatial practices can function as forms of witnessing, making visible the infrastructures of violence embedded within the everyday built environment.

Mark Romei is an architectural researcher and spatial practitioner whose work explores how creative and investigative methods can be used to document and challenge sites of violence. His practice brings together architectural research and artistic approaches to examine contested sites and consider how forms of violence are embedded within the built environment.

Mark recently completed a PhD at Monash University and has collaborated with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) on projects in Australia, Palestine, and Sweden.