To tell a story is to reconstruct an event - to find the right words, the perfect pose, expression, and tone. Re-telling stories can bring them back to life. They re-emerge outside ourselves, and with each retelling, the story and its truth evolve.

Here, a landscape of storytelling is created to challenge the incomplete truths embodied by the marginal space between the Auckland CBD and the university. The historical fragments in this area are implicated in a story of Auckland as a colonial capital and of early efforts to construct the nation of New Zealand.

There is a sense of many things forgotten. The physical pieces tell an incomplete story of both early and contemporary Tāmaki Makaurau. This project argues that efforts to encapsulate all of the complexities of history and a dynamic collective memory within a built form are futile. Instead, it considers how the insertion of new fragments can create spaces to share stories, construct new truths, and challenge old ones. By welcoming the tendency of both memory and history to verge on the fictional or unreliable, these storytelling spaces can expand our sense of truth and support the discovery of things forgotten or not known.

New fragments are introduced amongst the historical remnants, allowing new stories to be told adjacent to old ones. The interventions are gently superimposed upon existing routes and activities, blurring the boundary between the truths of the performance and the city. The Gatekeeper’s Lodge is adopted as one fragment in a series, a temporal datum within the dynamic network of activity. At the centre of this constellation, a theatre under a tentatively level roof presents evolving stories that challenge our morals and truths.