PU BL IC 2015
Untitled, Phlegm, Fremantle. Photograph by Jean Paul Horre, 2015.
FORM Building a state of creativity 357 Murray Street Perth, Western Australia E mail@form.net.au T +61 8 9226 2799 W www.form.net.au ISBN 978-0-9872624-2-4 Published by FORM Printed by Scott Print Š 2015. All rights reserved. Copyright for the written content and this publication are held by FORM unless otherwise noted. Copyright for the artworks are held with the artist. Copyright for the photographic images is held by the photographer. No part of this document may be produced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in and form without prior permission from the publisher.
contents
Foreword—Lynda dorrington, executive director, FORM 7 SPEAKERS & ARTIST MAP 8
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Charles Landry: Symposium: a personal roundup
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PART 1: CONVERSATIONS AND IDEAS—PUBLIC2015 SYMPOSIUM
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— Keynote: Enrique Penalosa: a lens for inventing a better city —
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Public Space: Culture, Creativity & The People in City Making
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DAY ONE
Carol Coletta: PUBLIC Is About Us, For Us, By Us Thom Aussems: Smart Transformation: The Game Changers
Public Action: Inspired Leadership & Citizen Initiatives
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Erma Ranieri: South Australia: The Turning Point Geeta Mehta: Creativity & Social Capital Timo Santala: A Menu For Bringing People Together — keynote: Theaster Gates: place over time —
DAY TWO
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Public Art: Art & The City 49 Hetti Perkins: Space Into Place John Bela: You Are The City, We Are The City
Public Culture: Powerful Collaborations & Blurred Boundaries
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Paul Collard: Nurturing Creativity Alison Page: Cultural Narratives & Design
DAY THREE
Public Art in Action 68 Nandita Kumar: Reacting To What The City Offers
— Creativity, democracy, uncertainty: dreaming a new cultural architecture — 72
PART 2: ART AND COMMUNITY—PUBLIC IN ACTION
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Finding Our Place: Art, Artists and Citizens in Urban and Regional Ecologies Curating a Community: PUBLIC at 100 Hampton Road Artist interview: Moneyless Artist Interview: Pastel Artist interview: NeSpoon Homecoming But Not ‘Home’: The Aesthetic of Ian Strange Paints, Walls, Buckets and Socks: How the PUBLIC Murals Happen Monolithic Makeover: PUBLIC in the Wheatbelt PUBLIC Research: How the ‘Known’ Enriches the ‘Unknown’ Building a Sense of Community: How Public is Ultimately About Us Symposium speakers & moderators 102 Artists 108
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FORM and PUBLIC: 'building a state of creativity' in action — 123
About FORM 126 Thank you & Acknowledgements 127
ARTIST - JOHN SMITH
Praying Mantis, Amok Island, Fremantle. Photograph by Bewley Shaylor, 2015.
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ARTIST - JOHN SMITH
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UNTITLED, HENSE, cbh AVON SILOS, NORTHAM. Photograph by Bewley Shaylor, 2015.
FOREWORD
FOREWoRD Lynda Dorrington, Executive Director of FORM
How to capture the highlights from a celebration of urban art and ideas that spans Western Australia from Fremantle to Port Hedland, via the Wheatbelt? A series of events that encompasses many individual and collective acts of mark-making, be they in paint on the buildings (and grain silos) of our cities and towns, or in what is said at a Symposium or a workshop, or through the connections made (socially, artistically and emotionally) at the opening party of an exhibition? So many of the moments are ephemeral, so much is to do with the atmosphere, the electricity of immediacy. When people come together to think about and debate how culture and creativity enriches the way in which we live, and how we can improve our places, neighbourhoods and cities for the good of all, it is pretty much impossible to document all the conversations, ideas, and energy. During PUBLIC2015, these conversations and these ideas were bubbling up all over Perth and Fremantle, in Victoria Park, Leederville, Northbridge and Claremont. They were happening in Northam, and in the Pilbara. On street corners, road-sides, cafés and galleries; in the temporarily re-purposed exhibition spaces of a Murray Street op-shop and an Albany Highway motorbike showroom. In buses, on foot, on the way to these exhibitions. They were happening wherever there was a mural to look at, a survey to fill in, an artist to speak to, or an event which meant people got together because they wanted to engage with the art, with the ideas, and most importantly, with each other. In attempting to gather some of those moments so we can reflect on what PUBLIC was and will continue to be as it unfolds in 2016, we have put together a snapshot of the breadth of the delivery in this PUBLICation and through the release of the video content from the Symposium via PUBLIC 2016 [http://public.form.net.au] We hope the imagery will transmit some of the wonder and excitement and sheer excellence of the artistic experience. And we hope the words and film footage from the Symposium speakers, participants, and artists, will engender some sense of what we were hoping to inspire: a recognition of the potential and responsibility we can all share in shaping equitable, caring, creative places in which to live and flourish; and how creativity and innovation are essential in helping us to do that. The PUBLIC 2016 program continues to mature, building greater variety and versatility into the public offering. We will welcome international artists and speakers to share their creativity and we introduce PUBLIC Platform, which will invite creatives, designers and makers of all kinds to participate in reshaping our community by submitting their ideas for installations, interactive works, artistic interventions or activations that can entice the public to rediscover their neighbourhood and come out to play. We’ll call out for your ideas in November. We hope you’ll join us for the next evolution of PUBLIC in 2016.
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SPEAKERS SECTION AND HEADING ARTIST MAP
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SPEAKE R S & A R TISTS 2
Speakers Artists
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SPEAKERS AND ARTIST MAP
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PUBLIC2015 Symposium
C h a rl e s L a n dr y Symposium speaker, author and urban strategist
The Symposium: a personal roundup
CHARLES LANDRY - EDITED PRESENTATION
There is a deep yearning for shared experiences and shared conversation as well as desire for projects, places and platforms where such encounters can unfold. It focuses our attention on the great virtues of ‘being public’.
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‘Public’ is a rich concept with countless associations and numerous manifestations. It is ‘for the people, ‘by the people’ and ‘with the people’. Applied to cities it seeks to foster a social life conducted in an open, accessible public realm as a means of connecting communities of difference. Here is where a city comes together. This creates better cities, yet most of the cities we have do not meet this aspiration. There is a physical public sphere, which creates good conditions for encounter, gathering and exchange, but also an invisible one where the predominant culture of place is open, engaging, involving with a flourishing atmosphere for discussion. The PUBLIC Symposium dived into this complexity, bringing people together from across the continents who had made a difference to their city and cities in general. Be this establishing the idea of open data that has spread across the world like a rash, so helping to reinvent democracy; or dramatically shifting the city of the car to one of bikes, buses and walkability where provocateur projects like ‘parking day’ or ‘parklets’ recapture car-space as people-space, so helping shift our mindset by highlighting ‘what could be’; or ‘restaurant day’ where now thousands of self-made restaurants invade cities across the globe; or new forms of social housing agencies that understand what comprehensive regeneration means; or creative bureaucracy projects that remind us that public administrations and officials exist whose approach is ‘to allow, if’ rather than ‘forbid, because’. These enlightened officials are much-needed ‘guerrilla bureaucrats’.
We saw the triggers, the catalysts and the game changers that helped to shift communities. Standing back, a change makers’ ‘eco-system’ became apparent: at times an individual or smaller grouping; at others an advocate or organisation, even an imaginative bureaucracy. A future task is to explore how they can coalesce to accelerate change processes. Taking an eagle-eye view of the content of PUBLIC—whose speakers were global, national and local—we can detect a set of overarching threads and themes. Most significantly, PUBLIC explored, fostered exchanges, and allowed us to connect to an emergent, evolving and unfolding world. We’ve seen that periods of history involving rapid, mass transformation can produce confusion: a sense of liberation combined with a feeling of being swept along by events. It can create a heady giddiness and it takes a while for the contours of the new to take firmer shape, and ethical stances to take root or to establish a more coherent world view. For example, the link between the individual and the group, which together are ‘the public,’ is gradually being reconfigured as former bonds to traditional communities have been fractured by increasing mobility. Yet new communications can also counteract this. The old and the new worlds live side by side. There is resistance to this emergent, reshaped world, as new ideas never have majority support. With new ideas, there is less linear thinking, less rigidity, less pre-judging and prejudice, less reliance on the triedand-tested, and there is more openness to the underexplored possibilities, more believing in the potential of people and a willingness to harness that potential. There is more encouragement of a start-up culture, more change in education where the self is treated as a learning resource. There is a massive resource waiting to be unleashed if conditions are right. Here ordinary people can make the extra-ordinary happen if given the chance.
PUBLIC2015 Symposium
Symposium participant
The planner of the future will need different characteristics. To put this city together requires a different form of planning where traditional concerns like spatial configurations, mixed and functions are combined with more exploratory planning focused on prototyping and strong urban R&D initiatives. This makes planning more responsive, and in addition it requires new skills such as mediation and communication. In this evolving city, citizens demand more. This rich register of potential experience might be characterised as developing places of anchorage and thus belonging, the familiar, traditions and heritage, identity and distinctiveness; places of possibility, options, choices and ‘can do’; places of connections internally and to the wider world; places of learning that enable personal growth; and finally a place of inspiration. To make this happen means raising the quality bar of physical infrastructures as well as the cultural offer. Or, put another way, the challenge for every city maker and the goal of planning is to get people to fall in love with their city, and this could help make our cities ‘living works of art’. We need to switch the question. Rather than ‘what is the value of creativity, culture, design, or risk taking’ instead we must ask: what is the cost of not taking culture and creativity into account?
images courtesy of charles landry
This symposium was up there with the very best; the choice of speakers, the curation of the sessions and the level of conversation was truly inspirational
Symposium participant
CHARLES LANDRY - EDITED PRESENTATION
When I got my hands on the program I knew that I had to be there
This world needs to be strategically principled and tactically flexible. The direction of travel is clear, although we are unsure how to get there. And this world is potentially exhilarating. It encourages ‘civic creativity’. Here individual self-interest is wrapped into a bigger public purpose and the private sector understands that public good activities can help their private interests; here the public sector understands that the bureaucracy can be more entrepreneurial within accountability principles and equity concerns. Overall this will create an atmosphere of civic generosity so encouraging a virtuous cycle of reciprocity. And to do this requires a reinvigorated democracy and it is struggling to burst through. The new bureaucracy and democracy can then create the conditions, the mechanisms, the regulations and incentives regime and the platforms for people and organisations to think, plan and act with imagination. ‘Place’ matters in this new context, as by living life in public you care more for it, you engage with it. What this demands is a different new-look city with an enhanced quality of place in order to foster talent attraction and retention, engagement and opportunity. This requires adopting a sensory perspective that understands the emotional effects of both the aesthetics of places as well as how the urban design is put together. The city is like a living organism that communicates through every fibre of its being: for good and for bad.
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PUBLIC2015 Symposium PART ONE
CONVERSATIONS & IDEAS The PUBLIC Symposium featured an illustrious panel of speakers from Australia and all over the world. Innovators, entrepreneurs, artists, city experts and urban game changers drawn from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, they all share a passion for making our cities and neighbourhoods equitable and healthy places in which creativity and innovation can flourish. — A full list of the Symposium speakers and moderators is on page 102. In the following pages we share some highlights from the Symposium. These transcripts of selected presentations have been edited. To see videos of the full presentations, go to http://public.form.net.au
THEASTER GATES, SPEAKING AT PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM, PERTH. Photograph by DAVID DARE PARKER, 2015.
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