Hospitality
Commissioned by John Holland as part of their bid for the New Footscray Hospital, Hospitality provided a deeply-researched account of the Footscray and associated region’s many-layered histories, story lines and their physical expression.
It adapted previously used by earth-sky analogies to map relationships able to heal a severely wounded country and community. It showed how a deeper, poetically-inspired, understanding of environment could, in turn, ‘heal’ the hospital, inaugurating a new and sustaining exchange between the emergency practices (and politics) of western medicine and community-based expertise in health self-management.
It showed how the necessary sacrifice of heritage-listed buildings could be turned round and the ‘scars’ of these disappearances incorporated into the new hospital body in the form of new commissions, new public programs and through analogous acts of compassion and repair. This comprehensive cultural and creative vison was produced under great pressure and we are immensely proud of the result.
