Errol Street Collective Residency
with Creative Spaces, City of Melbourne
10th - 31st March, 2023
54 Errol Street, North Melbourne
Featuring:
Emerald Wise
D’Arcy Newberry-Dupé
Christopher Langton
Stephanie Eather
Shellie Smith
Laura Syzman
erincox and blackwd
enzyme
Warwick Perrin
with Creative Spaces, City of Melbourne
10th - 31st March, 2023
54 Errol Street, North Melbourne
Featuring:
Emerald Wise
D’Arcy Newberry-Dupé
Christopher Langton
Stephanie Eather
Shellie Smith
Laura Syzman
erincox and blackwd
enzyme
Warwick Perrin
This collective residency involved the visual, theatrical, and spatial occupation of 54 Errol St, that beckoned the public to crawl out of their isolation caves and reclaim the city body as part of their own. In this space the mouth and the hand became thresholds for a gustatory and somatic graffiti that softens the boundaries between the physical body, and the body of the space that surrounds us.
Over the duration of a month (March 2023) the interdisciplinary collective of Artists, Architects, Designers, DJ’s and Makers curated and altered the space and facilitated public events. Exploring the softening of the boundaries between the physical body and city body, the installation pieces acted as a shifting topography to hold and capture event, activity and interaction between matter, bodies and space. The events held, cumulative drawing and mapping projects that capture these interactions, and the hard and light installations that occur as reactions to these events, emerge from and entangle a central table piece (Table Terrain) as the loci of activity.
While locked in our homes we have lost our intimate connection with the public sphere. This project invites us back out as the territorial animals we are to take a turn around the block and ‘piss on the tree’ so to speak. Rescuing our wonderous city from becoming merely abstract space and expanding our sense of self back into the greater body of the place we inhabit.
The shopfront is transformed into a stage for an ongoing performance piece that involves making, eating, altering, questioning, and yarning about the past and future of our selves and cities - perverting public space with private thoughts, the space offers a place of grieving and reclamation of the previously celebrated act of communal rituals of gathering and sharing - those activities that in recent times have gone through a transformation from wholesome to illicit, routine to taboo. So too, it offers a space to reconnect with our bodies, and those of the surrounding community. Bodies who have become sites of suspicion, resurrecting the hand and mouth as mediator between self and world, recalling them from their outcast as the zones of contagion and elicitors of disgust.
This project was completed with support from Creative Spaces, and funded by City of Melbourne.
Over the duration of a month (March 2023) the interdisciplinary collective of Artists, Architects, Designers, DJ’s and Makers curated and altered the space and facilitated public events. Exploring the softening of the boundaries between the physical body and city body, the installation pieces acted as a shifting topography to hold and capture event, activity and interaction between matter, bodies and space. The events held, cumulative drawing and mapping projects that capture these interactions, and the hard and light installations that occur as reactions to these events, emerge from and entangle a central table piece (Table Terrain) as the loci of activity.
While locked in our homes we have lost our intimate connection with the public sphere. This project invites us back out as the territorial animals we are to take a turn around the block and ‘piss on the tree’ so to speak. Rescuing our wonderous city from becoming merely abstract space and expanding our sense of self back into the greater body of the place we inhabit.
The shopfront is transformed into a stage for an ongoing performance piece that involves making, eating, altering, questioning, and yarning about the past and future of our selves and cities - perverting public space with private thoughts, the space offers a place of grieving and reclamation of the previously celebrated act of communal rituals of gathering and sharing - those activities that in recent times have gone through a transformation from wholesome to illicit, routine to taboo. So too, it offers a space to reconnect with our bodies, and those of the surrounding community. Bodies who have become sites of suspicion, resurrecting the hand and mouth as mediator between self and world, recalling them from their outcast as the zones of contagion and elicitors of disgust.
This project was completed with support from Creative Spaces, and funded by City of Melbourne.