Making Connection: Mapping Creative Encounters

Overview

Making Connection: Mapping Creative Encounters occurs between September 2023 – March 2024. The program connects multi-artform artists with diverse global audiences. Through practical collaborative experiences, the MFI and audiences explore ideas and possibilities for creative encounters, the many forms these take, how they are thought about, and how they can enhance social connectivity between people, ideas, place/belonging, ecologies, beings, materialities and more.

The program explores how creative encounters enhance social connection, especially as community and culture continue to recover from the pandemic. Creative encounters, often mediated across borders and interfaces, can spark and support relationships with others, with place, with ideas, and offer possibilities for thinking about different futures.

Audiences and presenters co-design an experimental framework for initiating, designing, and responding to creative encounters across different contexts.  

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Program

Exhibition and talks, DotDot Studios

The final event for Making Connection was held in the virtual space of DotDot Studios. Artists, performers, and presenters shared their practices and research in this event, held from 18 to 21 March 2024. Visitors came from across the world to view the exhibition rooms and attend the panels.

Program – Artist works

Perdita Phillips	Terrane project: Explosive Rock Love (2023), Kalgoorlie-Boulder Edgelands (2023), Terrane Project Drawing (2023)
Denise Chapman	Wade in Dem Words
Linda Knight, Pauliina Rautio, Marina Pliushchik, Kristina Vitek, and Anna Vladimirova	Meiän Mettä (Our Forest) (2023)
Alexis Shotwell and Lindsay Kelley	Mapping Distant Intimacies
Catalina Hernandez-Cabal and Ana Melissa Caballero	RESONATING – RESONATE & Cartografía de un Gesto
Kimbal Bumstead	Fragments and traces: re-imagining a city of sounds
Benjamin Sheppard	Scribble Me This…
Leah Sandler	Center For Post-Capitalist History Body Acclimation Strategies

Program – Panels

Wendy Steele	18 March, 8.15 – 8.45pm Spain. 18 March, 2.15 – 2.45pm NYC. 19 March, 8.15 – 8.45am NZT. 19 March, 6.15 – 6.45am AUS.	Back to Earth: Sketching Planetary Futures
Kate Stevenson, Macarena Campbell Parra, Joanna Cook, alys longley, Sarah Knox	18 March, 5 – 6pm Chile. 18 March, 3 – 4pm NYC. 19 March, 9 – 10am NZT. 19 March, 7 – 8am AUS.	Making connections across distance and language
Denise Chapman	18 March, 4 – 4.45pm NYC. 18 March, 9 – 9.45pm UK. 19 March, 8 – 8.45am AUS. 19 March, 10.15 – 10.45am NZT.	Wade in Dem Words
Peter Kelly, Seth Brown, James Goring	21 March, 2.15 – 2.45am NYC. 21 March, 7.15 – 7.45am UK. 21 March, 6.15 – 6.45pm AUS.  21 March, 8.15 – 8.45pm NZT.	Mapping Marginalised, Disengaged and Historically Disadvantaged Young People’s Future Imaginaries
Paul Paschal, Pavle Heidler, Adam Naughton, Janaina Moraes, alys longley, Val Smith	21 March, 3 – 4am, NYC. 21 March, 8 – 9am UK. 21 March, 9 – 10am Sweden. 21 March, 7 – 8pm AUS. 21 March, 9 – 10pm NZT.	Botany of Desire
Catalina Hernandez-Cabal and Ana Melissa Caballero	21 March, 4 – 5am NYC.  21 March, 10 – 11am Spain. 21 March, 8 – 9pm AUS. 21 March, 10 – 10.30pm NZT.	Cartography of a Gesture: Meeting in movement and making place

RMIT Co-labs

Held at RMIT University, Melbourne. Physical and virtual workstations and creative interactions allow audiences to participate in research on creative encounters by MFI researchers. Through a co-design approach to exploring concepts, values, and practices, participants and researchers work collectively to create draft frameworks for guiding creative encounters that develop social connections across different contexts. 

Making Connection: A Letter to Love and Territory – Lisa Roet, Hannah Dahlenburg, Grace Leone

A co-performance by Lisa Roet and Hannah Dahlenburg into the plight of Bornean southern gibbons.

Making connection: Extending identities through playful fauxportraiture – Sarah Crinall, Karen Preston/Crinall

What’s it like to be other? The more-than-human you are? Engage in fauxportrait-making, becoming anew. Meet your ‘more than human hybrid self’ artfully acting-out the connected future the planet needs.

Making Connection : Expanded Writing : Embodied Practice : Mistranslation Studies – Alys Longley

This workshop explored an unfolding between practices of experimental writing and embodied composition.

Making Connection: Is Access an Issue of Ethics – Jenny Hickinbotham, Caroline Bowditch, Fay Jackson, Neil Turton-Lane, Daryl Taylor

Should we be tackling Australian ethical systemic beliefs or something else in supporting change in access to equality for disabled peoples?

Making Connection: Ecosomatic creative encounters of the ecological body in the urban environment – Vannessa Chapple, Emily Bowman

Explore ecosomatic practices as prompts to ecological bodies – real-time, moving memory banks – to generate stories yet untold.

Making Connection: Merri Creek sensewalk – Perdita Phillips

Extend your senses and develop a new appreciation of Merri Creek on an ‘experience walk’ that combines the arts and sciences.

Making Connection: Mapping posthuman citizens and civics – Linda Knight

How might our encounters with art help us to speculate on the more-than-human citizens to come?

Making Connection: Mapping Migratory Meeals at the Ends of the World: MMMEEOW! – Stephen Loo, Marnie Badham, Poppy de Souza, Samid Suliman

A shared ‘meal at the ends of the world’ explored the relationships between food cultures, migration and the politics of listening.

Video provocations

Atmospheric Attunements of Gendered Childhoods. Sid Mohandas. 2023.

Sensory Mapping. Kimbal Bumstead. 2023.

Make a drawing of how it feels to be a body in a space. Choose somewhere you can sit comfortably with a sketchbook or some paper and something to draw with. Close your eyes and tune in to the space around you. Listen to the sounds you hear, notice how it feels to be in that space at that moment and try to capture your experiences through the marks you make on paper. Imagine your marks as an interpretation of the qualities of what you feel.

Start by trying to tune in to a single sound. Don’t try to think too much about the source of the sound; just explore how it feels to hear it. Is it rough? Is it loud? Is it delicate? Does it swirl? Does it judder? Is it flat? Try to make your marks reference those qualities and play with your drawing tool gesturally to represent how those sounds feel.

What can you learn about this place through the process of drawing? Try to focus on one sensation at a time, but allow yourself to be distracted as you notice something new. Use the drawing process to tune into what intrigues you and think of your point of contact with the paper as your point of contact with what you focus on. And then maybe go inwards, not just to the external sensations around you, but into your own body; The feeling of the air on your skin, and the vibrations of sound in your body.

Please take a photo of your drawing(s) add with a few words describing the place you were in and add it to the MFI Miro board. I will compile your drawings into a digital collage.

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Seminar

The Making Connection online seminar addressed transdisciplinary feminist futures, walking with plants, and a scoping review of mapping creative futures.

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Poster Gallery

Across the Mapping Future Imaginaries network, artists, industry specialists, and academics take interesting forays into key concerns impacting contemporary life – for humans and more-than-humans living in the world. This collection of posters showcases a small snapshot of these projects and how differently we can think about the pressing issues of our time.

The virtual poster session features visual research into the swamp beneath the bluestone, atmospheres, and unmapping space. MFI researchers share how they explore different approaches to enacting creative encounters for social cohesion and development.

Poster gallery archive

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Outputs and Outcomes

• A special issue journal publication on social connection through creative encounter
• A co-designed framework in diverse physical and digital formats that foregrounds inclusive approaches to creative encounters for social belonging and connection. The framework will contain spoken word, visual and video materials, and written documentation to enhance translatability and usability across the lifespan 
• The framework will be available as a video, as decal stickers, and as a fold-out map.

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