Queen Victoria Gardens

This map-making workshop will introduce you to creating information using texture and touch, rather than traditional 2D mark-making. It reflects on material communications in design practices and the politics in decision-making—from whose perspective was the decision made? And who got to make the map? Maps are often made for wayfinding, but can you make a map that’s personal?

Through site-responsive material exploration, you will be invited to go for a walk and wander together around Alexandra Gardens near the MPavilion. You will be asked to pick up objects that interest you and incorporate them into making a site-specific map. Explore together mapping techniques, share a walking journey, and discuss our personal connection to paper, mapping materials and their embedded meanings, making a map that reflects your experience around and in the Alexandra Gardens. Play with different mapping techniques and tools from images to plain paper, seeds, fabric attached with glue or sewing. Think about textures and sensation, and how these can be connected to knowledge of place. Build up a topographical map of the area being mapped by forming the paper itself into a 3-dimensional topography, giving form and tactility to what is often only 2D.

This event is an outcome of the 2023 M_Curators program, which supports young and ambitious art, design, and creative workers to gain practical experience in developing and curating public events and programs.

The M_Curators program is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Collaborators:

Makushla Harper is an emerging industrial designer originally from Tasmania, now based in Naarm/Melbourne. She is studying a Bachelor of Industrial Design at RMIT University, where her design process is informed by materiality, physicality, and behavioural interaction. She is particularly passionate about developing less environmentally destructive materials. She is also interested in exploring how we interact with tactile objects and how these objects shape our daily experiences and behaviour. She hopes to explore what materiality means for different people, and how it impacts us both consciously and subconsciously.

Joy Zhou is a transdisciplinary artist and design practitioner based in Naarm/Melbourne whose practice draws on embodied experiences to communicate complex intersectional relations. Expanding on their background in interior design, Joy works with immediate contexts. They often interrogate norms with queering gestures and aim to amplify unnoticed existence within everyday life.

Giorgia Pisano is a design researcher, practitioner, and educator based in Naarm / Melbourne. With a background in industrial engineering and time added as a furniture designer-maker, she is currently completing her practice-based PhD at RMIT University.