Image credit: Package Landscapes Australia
This event explores how strengthening cultural ecosystems and communities can contribute to wider regenerative change, that is long-term and holistic, prioritising equity, participation and resilience. By recognising the deep interconnections between culture and the sociopolitical, economic, and environmental systems, we ask: how do we value and support thriving cultural practices? What structural and policy mechanisms need to be in place to give voice and agency to community, especially those less heard? How do we create enduring, secure environments for artists to live, work and take risks? How can cultural practice support the well-being of both human and more-than-human worlds?
coordinator
Kate Goodwin
panel
Heidi Axelsen
Dr Hugo Moline
Matt Levinson
Sophie Lieberman
Heidi Axelsen and Dr Hugo Moline have an experimental spatial practice, drawing on forms and tactics from architecture, art and social process. In their practice they make things not as an end in themselves, but rather as a means to foster alternate relationships, both between people and the material world as well as amongst people. Hugo is an architect, artist, urbanist and researcher and Program Convenor of the Master in Architecture, University of Newcastle. Heidi is an artist, who has worked in local government (including Bankstown Art Centre and Creative Industries at Blue Mountains City Council) and is a PhD candidate at MADA, Monash University (supervised by Kathy Waghorne / Mel Dodd).
Dr Hugo Moline is an architect, artist, urbanist and researcher. He is co-director of MAPA Art & Architecture (with Heidi Axelsen) and Program Convenor of the Master in Architecture, University of Newcastle. He specialises in working with collective client groups, from the tight knit communities of migrant housing cooperatives to the complex, interwoven interest of diverse users of public space. He would be invited to speak about the project Open Field Agency, a project for the public domain of the Dank Street South Precinct that is “durational public art as a form of living maintenance.”
Matt Levinson, Head of Corporate Affairs, Committee for Sydney and author of the recent report Making it in Sydney: Actions to provide more creative production space
Sophie Lieberman. Cultural leader specialising in engagement and organisational transformation to create meaningful public value while ensuring organisational sustainability and delivering outcomes across policy, participation and profit. Past appointments include Director, Public, Education and Industry Programs, ACMI; Head of Programs, Sydney Living Museums; Manager, Science Communication, Australian Museum; and, numerous board and committee roles. Holds a PhD in history at UNSW, interrogating the politics of the built landscape and national identity; an alum of the Sydney Leadership Program and AICD.