Platform Arts is launching our inhouse publication Feasibility Study: Civic Imaginaries, as part of the Melbourne Art Book Fair (MABF). This informal event invites active thinkers to meet and share their experiences of civic agency and potential. Together we will launch the publication unbound, with all attendees contributing to the final version through editing and conversation over a shared meal. This event will be documented, and its conclusions included in the final publication.

Feasibility Study: Civic Imaginaries resulted from the City of Greater Geelong's Creative Communities Grant Program awarded in 2022, and documents a series of public artworks that could have taken place in Geelong/Djilang. The publication is a modest, speculative, humorous and slightly provocative examination of the possibilities for public art and civic agency in Geelong/Djilang through hyper fiction and the commissioning of ‘concept' works. The publication should be seen as a working document, a proposal, an application, a creative, cross-sector call-to-arms, and an ambitious civic-vision statement.

Feasibility Study: Civic Imaginaries is supported by the City of Greater Geelong through its ‘Creative Communities Grant Program.' This event is presented as part of Melbourne Art Book Fair.

Event speakers:

Rebecca Taylor

Jose Rodriguez

Grant Divall

Lynda Roberts

Tarryn Love

Dr Jonathan Daly

Vanessa Schernickau

Yolanda Esteban

Publication contributors:

Bec Stevens

Bec Stevens is an artist preoccupied with plants, people and places. She trained in Fine Arts, Environmental Design and Horticulture. She uses emergent strategies to weave understandings of the social, and geographical attributes of the places we inhabit and embody. Bec lives and works in nipaluna, lutruwita.

Grant Divall

Grant Divall is a non indigenous architect who lives and works on Wadawurrung Country, in Djilang (Geelong). He is an established and experienced architect and studio leader. The areas that frame his activity are social and public space, affordable housing, self-build housing, suburban transformation, spatial practices, walking, and Indigenous focuses.

Iván Martínez

Iván Martínez is an artist and book designer based in Mexico City. His work focuses on the development of fictitious narratives and speculative publications exploring the aesthetics of rumour and its mechanisms of propagation and modification. He is the author and designer of the publications, Megaphone News, The Sunken School, and Unusual Persecutions.

Jan Adriaans

In his special interests: biology, power and social structure and the self, Jan Adriaans finds his topics. By drawing a parallel with the animal, the set of constraints we are subjected to become more apparent. His work consists of film, photography, sound and writings.

Laurie Oxenford

Laurie Oxenford is an artist, curator and public art producer. Her interdisciplinary spatial practice investigates the construction and potential of urban spaces and ecologies. By acknowledging the temporality of all things Laurie’s work is inherently site-responsive and thrives on human and non-human exchange. Laurie currently practices in the Yugambeh language region.

Lynda Roberts

Lynda Roberts is an interdisciplinary practitioner exploring the social dynamics of public space. Drawing on a background in architecture, public art and community radio, Lynda often makes projects in situ, co-creating experiences that playfully explore the world and the spaces between us. Lynda lives and works on the unceded traditional lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung peoples.

The Rogue Academy

The Rogue Academy is an art education and research collective. Using social and participatory art as examples of how to encourage empathy, innovation, autonomy, resilience, and inclusion, The Rogue Academy (Fiona Lee and Amanda Shone) develop a range of research platforms and interdisciplinary projects that favour transformative experiences. They live and practice on the unceded lands of the Wadawurrung and Woi-wurrung Peoples.

Yoeri Guépin

Yoeri Guépin is a visual artist, researcher and gardener working with communities, ecosystems and film. His experience of being brought up at a biodynamic farm, together with his interest in cultural histories and ecosystems, have resulted in an array of ecological projects that often find their form in gardens that act as vessel and entrance to marginal (hi)stories and nonwestern epistemologies.