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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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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.

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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.

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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

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cities as ecosystems

Illustration for Assemble Papers by Marc Martin

I (semi-)recently had an article with the above title published in Assemble Papers… it looks at what we can learn from ecosystems about building resilience into the form and function of our cities.

More than half the world’s population now lives in cities. Urbanisation has quickened dramatically in recent decades, with an estimated 1 million people moving to cities every week. Humanity is on the move and is now overwhelmingly urban. Cities have already shown their capacity to adapt and profoundly influence the shape of humanity. Now it’s up to us to influence the shape of our cities.

Read the rest of Cities as Ecosystems if you like.