sticking the boot in..

for the past, i'd say, month i have been playing a game of cat and mouse or perhaps a one to many game with a single bludstone boot that appeared on the street i live. Every couple of days it gets moved to a new location. On my walk home I find it, put it in a new crevis, and then a couple of days later it moves somewhere else. I finally felt this had gone on long enough and decided to raise the stakes a little.. last night i stuck the boot in a very prominent place hanging out of a wall with flowers in it. This morning I walked past and it was still there, although someone had taken one of the flowers. which is cute. I am quite excited to see what happens next..

Lafarge eco systems are a company in kenya who have, over thirty years, created complete ecosystems from depleted quarries. They rehabilitate the wasteland by planting casuarina pine (an australian tree) which is the only tree to thrive in the limestone conditions. Once grown, the pine nettles drop to the ground and decompose which add nutrients to the ground. This takes a long time, but they discovered the red millipede (locally abundant) was able to feed and digest the nettles which greatly sped up the process. Once the layer of nutrients is returned to the ground other insects, birds and animals return (birds, bats etc) which add to the dispersal of nutrients, and then they thin the pines and introduce local plants and vegetation.
They have created a variety of ecosystems including grasslands and have even restored wetlands from sterile, murky quarry water. This land is protected, and they have introduced mammals such as giraffes, buffalos, and hippopotamuses successfully. Incredible stuff. I became aware of them because of Owen and Mzee. You'd probably remember this story from the huge tsnumai. A baby hippo had been washed out of a river in Kenya and into the sea and he was stranded on coral. He was rescued by Lafarge and named Owen. When they released him in the park he immediately latched onto a 100 year old tortoise named Mzee who is now his adopted mother. It's seriously cute. Anyway their keeper has kept a blog from the very beginning and continues to update it every couple of days. Have a look here: http://www.lafargeecosystems.com/main/blog.php?mod=view&page=1

My universe is awalk around the block..

Teddy's talk reminded me of a project i did in berlin when i was over there doing a residency as part of transit lounge. i wasn't happy with the execution - thinking i needed a litlle more time, equipment and ingenuity to pull off my video solar system that the participant was the centre of - so i kind of ejected it from my brain. however i was speaking one of the organisers of the transit lounge at teddy's talk which reminded me of my own border theories i had been playing with and she was saying that the local press in berlin responded to my work, what exactly i'm not sure but it was positive. It was the first time i had really thought about it since i left.
So, backtracking, the residency's main theme was, as the name would suggest, transit.. i was particularly interested in travellers and the geo-political borders they cross in order to get where they are going ie crossing the middle east en route to europe from sydney.. and wanted to use google earth as the technology.. I'd worked out how to record video from the hard drive of google traking which was a start.. and then spent weeks of hell over-intellectualising everything, blowing out ideas and failing to put my finger on any one thing. Those weeks involved waking up at our apartment, walking around one corner of the block to get bread, walking around the next corner to get to the gallery, and then walking around the next corner in the evening to get beer. So essentially, I had spent 2 days in transit to go to the other side of the world to spend my days walking around this one little block in Friedricshain. A realisation thankfully. So I'd already worked out how to map ontop of google earth so I took a walk around the block and gathered textures from my journey around it.. i then created a solar system of planets mapping the textures to the earth and recording the planets orbit as video. The plan was then through projectors and monitors to emulate a universe with me, you , whoever being the centre of it. I also made a map book, that was a pictorial rationale of the idea. Unfortunately after weeks of being immersed in it technology decided to fail on me and file formats, computers, and projectors all decided to crap out. Oh if given a few more days. This left me deeply dissapointed and I didn't want to think about it anymore, let alone think about another video project for a while. So months later, i find out my little book was all it took for the Friedricshain press to warm to it and discuss it, hooray. And this info fresh on the back of Teddy's inspirational talk. Maybe I'll start tracking my daily walks again..

teddy cruz

So i went and saw teddy cruz speak last night who is amazing and inspirational. i think i was particularly interested having just spent time in america and gaining a more tangible understanding of the illegal immigrant situation and how the economy is totally dependent on it, and was interested in someone who looked at actual and social borders and the transgression between the two and how best to work within them. It was a lot to digest - the thing that's stuck in my head is his statement about not being able to get money from urban planning or government groups to develop his 'solutions' to public housing, and instead had to get money from art institutions for 'installations' as it were. It must be frustrating. His work is socially focused and to say well you can do it if it looks good but we're not interested in it for real urban planning R&D purposes must be a double edged sword. And that made me start thinking about why social services don't have the same R&D capital attached as other government responsibilities as health and science, industry etc, and then I remembered that you can't make money off poor people, and that you don't want people in public housing to feel secure or comfortable because then they may not feel so worthless about being poor. Anyway I will stop this before i get waver to the cynical side - a lot of what was discussed last night is also discussed here: http://www.aia.org/cod_lajolla_042404_teddycruz

So this blog is turning into quite the diary, but I had to write about my dream on the weekend. So there i was on another planet, and it was populated with humans in a kind of ramshackled downtown way but there was a lot of ruble around instead of concrete etc.. anyway I walked into one of the buildings and there was a guy sitting at a table. I sat down and started a conversation. Apparantly the 'mission' as it were, was the brain child of Robert Kennedy, and he set the thing up under the JFK administration. The man then told me that he used to work in a casino in Vegas, but one day it burned down so Bobby sent him and his co-workers to this planet to start afresh. We were then joined by a couple of other people, and I asked them this and that. The standout problem it seemed was that everything was very expensive and they had to share their socks.
I told my friend about this and she thinks perhaps I am the next L.Ron Hubbard. Anyway, it was nice to remind myself about RFK.. he seemed like a fairly decent guy.
More on Bobby at wikipeadia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy
The above image is from Death Valley - which totally felt like being on another planet - amazing, quite scary place.

for all your laundry needs?

found last night behind the park on fovuex st surry hills.

my giant attraction

since i've been back i've taken to riding around centennial park on my beauty the 'giant attraction'. at first it felt very wierd.. like i now had to start reading the good weekend religously, and be overly concerned with financial planning. then it kind of felt like participation in present nostalgia if that makes ny sense. but, you know what? it's just really nice. a few laps round the park and you see a bunch of people from all over the shop kicking back and looking pretty happy. community groups, exented families, teams, lovers, teenagers getting up to no good, parents bonding with their children.. all hanging out and being generally tolerant of each other. i've been trying hard, but i can't really knock it. who knows i may even find myself picnicing there one day..