FINDING SPACE TO REMAKE: The Story of the Warracknabeal Creative Circuit

Description

The Afterlives of Cities research collective brings together expertise in architecture, cosmologies, fabrication, and installation to recover futures in space through questions about how we ethically imagine and enact worlds for ourselves and others. Our approach to working together includes activities that sit alongside more traditional architectural practices, and which highlight care and concern for the historical, cultural, and technological landscape as it re-composes urban experience. In a recently completed project in the Wimmera-Mallee region of Australia - the Warracknabeal Creative Circuit - the role of civic creative practice
has been explored through ‘making together’ via community-led craft and digital fabrication, local industry collaborations, material reuse, participatory workshops and festivals, and creative media outputs. Operating during the lockdown years of the pandemic from 2020-2021, these endeavours also set up a parallel kind of discussion of what can be repaired and remade in remote communities. We will tell a story of finding space to make a makerspace: to imagine futures in a small town simultaneously experiencing declining advantage and a long history of what needs to be made good again. These contradictions had implications
for our own ideas of what a makerspace can enable for a community. In undertaking this work, we noticed, attempted to negotiate, and when possible reconciled competing notions of what and who should be repaired - and who should do the repairing - within the town and more generally. Critical to our story of the Warracknabeal Creative Circuit has been uncovering already rich epistemologies of marginalised individuals and groups within the community. Our experience has been that perceptions of the future of Warracknabeal are often linked to modes of repair and forms of care work that elide members of the
community who have great, if unheard, potential to direct and realise what the town might become.

Period	23 Oct 2023 → 25 Oct 2023
Event title	Situated Ecologies of Care: The 20th AHRA International Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Portsmouth , United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International