Play in Melbourne City
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Abstract
Play in Melbourne City outlines a series of playful incursions in Melbourne, Australia’s central city that hopes to act as a reminder of the potential power and influence that individual citizens have in disrupting, creating and recovering public space.
This is a practice-based exploration that uses Melbourne city as its site. Through a series of playful guerrilla theatre style incursions, the artist creates and embodies fictional characters that spontaneously appear throughout the city. Notions of the carnivalesque are harnessed through the use of masks, costumes and puppetry. Each character investigates and responds to a specific issue of spatial politics within the city, with the works importantly sitting outside of the scheduled template of gallery exhibitions and festivals.
For the conceptual framework, the artist draws on Henri Lefebvre’s ideas of the production of space and Chantal Mouffe’s ‘agonistic’ model of public space.
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References
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Hochgurtel, J. (1880). The Hochgurtel Fountain, portland cement fountain, Carlton Gardens, Melbourne
Incursion. ( 2020) Cambridge Online Dictionary. Cambridge University Press
Lefebvre, H, Author, Nicholson-Smith, D, and Lefebvre, H.(1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell,Oxford, UK
Mouffe, Chantal. (2007). “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” in: Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts, and Methods, 1/2, Summer 2007.
Sassen, S. (2017). ‘The City: A Collective Good?’ Brown Journal of World Affairs 2017 Spring /Summer , Volume xxiii, Issue ii
Stanford, W. (1870). William Stanford Bluestone Fountain. Gorden Reserve, Melbourne.