Image credit: Package Landscapes Australia
Creative practices and practitioners are central to restoring and producing healthy social and ecological systems that allow cities to flourish. Yet spaces are being lost, and artists are being marginalised within many of the existing systems. A robust and resilient cultural infrastructure is needed that includes not only equitable spaces to make, share, and live, but also just institutions, supportive policies, broad economic frameworks, networks of care, shared knowledges and access to participation. This panel asks how to enable artists to live, work and take risks in Australia’s major cities, and considers the role of cultural practice in transforming sociopolitical, economic, and environmental systems.
Chair
Kate Goodwin, The University of Sydney
panel
Matt Levinson, Committee for Sydney
Heidi Axelsen, MAPA Art and Architecture
Dr Hugo Moline, The University of Newcastle
Heidi Axelsen is an artist who has worked in local government (including Bankstown Art Centre and Creative Industries at Blue Mountains City Council) and PhD candidate at MADA, Monash University. She co-directs MAPA Art and Architecture, the art and architecture practice commissioned by the City of Sydney to develop the public art strategy and subsequent Open Field Agency Residency infrastructure and program in the Danks Street south precinct.
Dr Hugo Moline is an architect, artist, urbanist and researcher and Program Convenor of the Master in Architecture, University of Newcastle. He co-directs the MAPA Art and Architecture an art and architecture practice.
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.