Making Sense of Place
BodyPlaceProject collective is excited to have commenced a 4-year program entitled Making Sense of Place, bringing site-responsive performance and participatory arts to places and communities across the Yarra Ranges region, east of Melbourne/Narrm.
The program will offer place-based activities engaging with themes relevant to our times, such as climate change, social inequity and decolonisation. The activities will produce performances, exhibitions and other artistic outcomes, as well as deepening collaborative connections between artists, cultural custodians and other experts, to generate and revitalise art practices and foster new understandings of place.
The projects will bring together leading contemporary arts practitioners and foreground First Nations culture to consider how we can encounter places with care and nuance. Outcomes created in Yarra Ranges are intended for audiences both locally and further afield, and the program will include forums for discourse between local and international artists and practice-led thinkers.
The first projects are ‘Sensing Country’, a series of walks guided by Wurundjeri knowledge holders; and ‘On Country/In Residence’, an artists’ residency with a public exhibition outcome.
Making Sense of Place is supported by a Partnership grant from Yarra Ranges Council.
Sensing Country (2023 - 2024)
BodyPlaceProject is hosting short walks with Wurundjeri cultural knowledge holders investigating what it means to ‘listen to Country’. The walks are intended to deepen understandings of perceiving and reading the Country through the senses from Indigenous perspectives - for members of the local and visiting public, as well as for BodyPlaceProject artists.
Murrundindi – Kallista (Dec. 2023)
Aunty Julie Coombs (upcoming 2024)
Darren Wandin & Uncle Dave Wandin (upcoming 2024)
On Country/In Residence (2024 - 2025)
BodyPlaceProject collective will walk 'ngurrak barring', a new public art and cultural trail across the Dandenong Ranges (Corhanwarrabul), together with guest artists, all with deep interest in responding to place through their diverse artforms and perspectives. Over the 3-day 40km walk, artists will share practices and approaches to place, as a mobile, immersive professional development. Artists will develop their responses for a subsequent multi-arts exhibition that reflects their experiences of walking together listening to Country.