Alterations
2013
Material Thinking was part of the team commissioned to deliver the Dandenong Municipal Building project (architects: Lyons; landscape architects: Rush Wright).
We were responsible for developing program ideas for the civic square that formed an integral part of the project.
For the project we delivered four outcomes; a creative template (‘Alterations’), a public artwork integrated into the ground plane of the new square, a suite of public artworks applying place readings in the ‘creative template’ and an exhibition (at the Walker Street Art Gallery).
In relation to the ‘program’, Alterations was a creative template, a flexible diagram, score or spatial gesture that had the potential to draw together a variety of cultural and social activities to produce a shared, cosmetically articulated, or adorned, public domain.
True to the choreotopographical impulse, we understood our own activities as occurring inside the creative region we were finding.
We were proud to work with artists Dirk de Bruyn (video), Soo Yeun You and Shaun McLeod (both dance).
Enfolding
Instead of regarding the ground pattern as foundational – a ground on which figures would be arranged in the future – we took it as the accompaniment of concurrent creative activity, which, in return, was mimetically influenced by its formalisation of a folded space.
Paul Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, 2015, 271.