ZK/U May Openhaus

Here are some photos from the recent ZK/U Openhaus.

The Die Insel map is now mobile and was exhibited in various spaces in the Stadtgarten and around the ZK/U during the weekend. It has taken on a life of it’s own and can pull a crowd without me. People seem to be drawn to it, keen to read and share the secrets of Moabit.

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Downstairs in the main exhibition space was Unsere Insel, a series of maps created by eighteen Moabit residents. Since the April Openhaus, I have been meeting with Moabiters to hear more of the stories that connect the people of Moabit to the places around them. During the conversations, I asked the residents to draw a map of Moabit. This is what Moabit looks like in the minds of it’s inhabitants.

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Concrete Jungles

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illustration by Marc Martin

My latest Assemble Papers article, Concrete Jungles has just been published, accompanied by a beautiful illustration by Marc Martin.

“The urge to get out of the city and into nature is common among city dwellers. I know I’m not the only one who spends my weekdays staring at a screen, trying to focus on, say, writing an article, while at random intervals my brain begins to loop images of tempting countryside locales to retreat to on the weekend. But why do we think we have to travel so far from home to find nature? Is the binary between cities and nature a real thing?”

Read more

ZK/U April Openhaus

Here are some photos of my project in development from the OpenHaus a few weeks into the residency.

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Images 1, 3 & 4 courtesy of Marc Martin; Images 2 & 6 courtesy of Sheraz Khan; Image 7 courtesy of Samuel Kalika; Image 8 courtesy of Faisal Habibi.

Urban Myths

ZKUThe story of the city is written not by the historians or the travel bureaus. It is written and told as its people interact with its places through the simplicity of everyday life. We construct the sounds and the sights of the city with our busking and street art; We give it personality by exchanging smiles, stealing kisses and slamming car horns; We draw the lines on the map through our paths to work… and so on. Our stories build the city, brick by brick, paragraph by paragraph.

I am currently undertaking a four month residency at Berlin’s ZK/U – Centre for Art and Urbanistics – in the neighbourhood of Moabit. Here I will learn the stories that connect the people of Moabit to places that are meaningful to them in the simplest of ways. I will learn where people in Moabit go to cry, to laugh, to kiss, to shelter, to meet, to watch, to avoid.

During the residency at ZK/U, I will act as a Moabit ‘reverse tour guide’. I will invite Moabit residents to take me on tours to show how they connect with their neighbourhood, and what it is that they connect with. My tour guides will be the children, homeless people, architects, buskers, recent immigrants, teachers, the mayor, hipsters, hippies, and most other people too. These stories will be collated in a map of Moabit’s everyday.

This project acts simultaneously as a research project exploring how people connect with our place, the people around us, and our selves, as well as an opportunity for me to experiment with integrating her human ecology and sustainable community development skills and knowledge with my participatory arts practice.

My residency at ZK/U is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts.

on leadership

Laura Wills, 'Public Survey', 2010
Laura Wills, ‘Public Survey’, 2010

I was honoured to have been invited to speak to around seventy 18-24 year olds at the 2013 Rotary Youth Leadership Awards camp one month ago. The RYLA directors, Chris and Bill, asked me to speak about what I do and how I got to be doing it, linked to the themes of leadership and community. It was really valuable to take the time to reflect on these questions while preparing for the presentation, and I thought I’d upload a rough transcript of my presentation. It’s cheesy and earnest like it was meant to be.

Continue reading “on leadership”

In Passing

The morning after In Passing's test run
The morning after In Passing’s test run

Hot off the press… Just this very evening, I’ve launched the website for In Passing, my participatory art project on women’s day to day experiences of power and public space, unpacked through games of pass the parcel. Read all about it and get involved in the games through www.inpassing.com.au

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power, public space and pass the parcel

After reading this Herald Sun (!) article by Victorian Chief Commissioner Ken Lay, I thought this would be a good time to make public a project I’m developing. It’s a participatory community art project that will bring diverse groups of women together to highlight and unpack their day to day experiences of gender, power and public space.

While the issue of violent attacks against women often takes centre stage in the media, this project focuses on the constant undercurrent of gendered power plays that colour our everyday experiences of public spaces. From the lewd comments from men in passing cars, to the penis graffiti that lines our alleyways, to the omnipresent sexualised images of women plastered on bus shelters, these occurrences and images have subtle yet constant effects on our psychology acting as ever present reminders that we can’t get too comfortable in our public streets, that public space isn’t women’s space.

While such instances are considered too trivial to feature in the media or social commentary, they sit on the same spectrum as the more physical and violent acts against women in public space. They affect how we feel on our streets on a day-to-day level.

Through a series of twenty conversations structured in the familiar format of pass-the-parcel, In Passing will open discussions among groups of nine women at a time to reflect on their day-to-day experiences of public space in a light-hearted, constructive and forward-looking manner through a series of facilitated activities. At the same time, by creating opportunities to connect with neighbours, the sense of community and care will be strengthened across the suburb.

Already the project has received interest from across Australia from community leaders, school counsellors and gender studies teachers. In Passing can be considered a pilot for a much wider participatory community art project seeking to highlight and challenge gender inequalities inherent in our cultural norms, and explore ways that women can reclaim our public space.

The project is ready to go – the pass the parcel prototype is ready to be replicated and I’m waiting to hit go on promotions and web development, but I’m just waiting for some funding to come in so I can buy materials. Fingers crossed all these conversations I’m having with a particular organisation will amount to something!

berliners all round

Berliner3Two good newses.

Firstly, I’ve been invited to participate in Berlin’s Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik (Centre for Art and Urbanistics)’s residency program for four months to conduct a hybrid research / participatory community art project called Urban Myths. Secondly, I’ve been awarded a very generous grant from The Australia Council for the Arts to undertake the ZK/U residency. Thanks guys! We’ve postponed the residency til March next year so I’ve got a fair whack of time to build up excessive levels of excitement and work out how to do an umlaut on this keyboard in the meantime.

The residency project will be an extension of my Human Ecology MSc research about connection and resilience, this time focusing on learning stories about how people in Berlin connect to place, to each other, and to their selves (rather than just waxing lyrical about the importance of making these connections). I realise I keep promising to expand on my posts later, and I wholeheartedly believe that I will, so I’ll make another promise now… more on this project to come.

field trip

photo by Lucas Ihlein
photo by Lucas Ihlein

I just noticed that un Magazine has updated their website. I also just noticed that I haven’t got a link here to the article I wrote for them last June about farming, art, design and activism…

Having pedaled across the Yarra one Saturday morning in October 2011, I found my friend amongst a cluster of people waiting in the foyer of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. A few weeks prior, Julie had forwarded me an email invite to an art field trip to ‘investigate the influence of Australian farmer Percival Alfred Yeomans’…

Read the rest of the article at the schmancy new un website.

mind weeding

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Fennel pollen, sweeter than honey. Photo by Eugenia Lim

My latest article for Assemble Papers, ‘The Edible Ecology of Weeds’ is now up…

An afternoon with author & permaculturalist Adam Grubb starts with a harvest of garden variety weeds. Oxalis, nettle, mallow and dandelion leaves all go into the Vietnamese pho Adam prepares from scratch. I call Adam a “mind weeder” (no, that’s not a typo or speech impediment). Over soup and a forage, Adam shares his psychological and philosophical approach to weeding the garden.

Read the full article