Linda Knight & Alys Longley
Mapping future imaginaries, 2021

Through a program of interactive and collaborative mapping, the mapping future imaginaries concentric curriculum speculated on worlds to come. The project brought together different ideas and standpoints, diverse knowledge and practices together to generate actions towards future utopias during times of immense uncertainty and social, economic, environmental, and political flux. The mapping future imaginaries concentric curriculum considered possibilities for diverse citizens and communities, imagining new civics, more-than-human futures, and social and environmental systems that critique the damage of current structures and prejudices.

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Program Included:

Possum skin cloak cartographies.
Dja Dja Wurrung educator Dr Aleryk Fricker explored how possum skin cloaks inscribe the land in ways for keeping culture strong. In this workshop participants learned about Al’s possum skin pedagogy and making collaborative cloak designs.

Intergenerational counter-mapping
We send postcards as snapshots of places we visit to others, and in doing so we convey an experience to people we know, extending a cartography of a place outwards. On a blank postcard, adults and children work collaboratively to create a non-pictorial, sensorial counter-mapping of a meaningful local space. There should be discussion and decisions made about why the space is meaningful and what to include in the mapping. You can stay in one spot to create a map, or take a walk somewhere. This intergenerational counter-mapping builds an urban cartography of the ways children feel about their place and how they orient themselves in urban space.

A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps and Migrant Constellations
View website here
The Mapping Porous Borders Project presented a digital exhibition created collaboratively with artists from every continent of the world. The site was available for the opening and closing of the Mapping Future Imaginaries Concentric Curriculum. Alys Longley collaborated with Kate Stevenson of DotDot digital design studios and participating artists to create a bespoke digital platform for visual art exhibition and performance showings that offers a space for sociality, playfulness, choreographic spatiality and interactivity. Through a simple URL, visitors from anywhere in the world can enter this work and discover a labyrinth of maps and landscapes to move through interactively.

Mapping posthuman citizen shadows
Shadows are a kind of empirical evidence, generated by all forms of ‘life’ and ‘being’. Using Linda Knight’s inefficient mapping protocol, visitors to Bus Projects could take a fold-out map or postcard with prompts for mapping the shadows of diverse things and beings in the urban scape. The collation of the shadow mappings will build a posthuman citizen data-bank that counters the usual population data of cities and towns.

Mapping Porous Borders.
The Mapping Porous Borders Project, (led by Alys Longley with over 60 artists across the world) has been posting envelopes between artists since the pandemic reached NZ and Chile in March 2020, generating collaboration and connection. The envelopes want to keep us in touch, sharing physical contact through shared practices of making things, testing borders, and creating circulatory systems of connection and care. In this iteration at Bus Projects gallery visitors were invited to view/participate in this gift economy. If participants found something they wanted to keep in an envelope, they could keep it, on the condition that they a) contribute a work using the materials provided, and b) archive both the work they take and the work they give, to our Concentric Curriculum Instagram, in order to archive this work as it distributes itself.

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