Five public art commissions for vacant city spaces funded by Wellington City Council’s City Recovery Fund have been announced by public art organisation Letting Space and vacant space brokers Urban Dream Brokerage. They will be produced by artists over the remainder of 2021 and early 2022 with spaces brokered for them by the brokerage.
Included are a space for a younger inner city community to grow, a place to acknowledge the wairua of the city through matauranga Māori and rongoa, a makerspace employing thrown out materials from local businesses, a ‘housing crisis reflection and assessment centre’ and a centre to examine our community, cultural and familia approaches to postpartum (post-birth) care. The projects will be led by Mouthfull; Tanya Te Miringa Te Rorarangi Ruka; Xin Cheng and Adam Ben-Dror; Bek Coogan and Heleyni Pratley; and Holli McEntengart.
Founding brokerage managers Letting Space have selected the projects, and their delivery will be managed by new Urban Dream Brokers Maverick Creative.
Aside from these commissions, the Urban Dream Brokerage remains open to anyone with an innovative, participatory project to apply for the use of a vacant space. A sixth commission, artist and critical engineer’s Julian Oliver Electromagnetic Geographies occurred in May in Wellington’s Cuba Mall.
Project summaries
Mouthfull: Commonspace
How can a space nurture a sense of hope and interconnectedness? This project creates a central place of being and belonging, learning and connecting, through de-siloing knowledge and cross-pollinating disciplines, holding whanaungatanga for a younger inner city community to connect more consciously. Commonspace will hold similar behaviours to a library and allow participants to play with a critique of what it is to belong in ‘the commons’, exploring space outside of traditional transactions. It will provide an enlivening space to incite creative collaboration alongside a guided programme of kōrero, learning, stillness, sensation and wonder. The purpose of Commonspace is for the public to step out onto the street feeling more connected and alive than when they entered.
Mouthfull is an arts collective of young film-makers, space creators, digital artists and social facilitators guided currently by Jack Gittings, Raquel Manks, Sarah Lee, and Ollie Hutton. Through creation, curation and facilitation of artworks, experiences and spaces - Mouthfull manoeuvres an experimental and collaborative approach to explore the notion of consciously consuming in all its forms. Taking shape in immersive installations, guided tours, workshops, improvised performance, radio broadcasting, and being together in creativity.
Tanya Te Miringa Te Rorarangi Ruka: Rongoa Māori
Rongo-marae-roa-a-rangi: He moemoeā. Rongoa Māori – Acknowledging the wairua of the inner city. Tanya Ruka’s project will map the inner city with the mātauranga Māori concepts māramatanga, kāitiakitanga and mānakitanga. It asks how we protect and enhance the Mauri, the life force within urban environments, and suggest that when we look to regeneration we must first go back to the source, what was here before and what has happened since. Ruka will explore how we communicate with the wai and awa below and what is the wairua of the land being shared with us. The project will also explore how we introduce biodiverse ecosystems into this place of concrete. How do we plant the seeds?
Tanya Te Miringa Te Rorarangi Ruka is of Ngati Pakau, Te Uriroroi, Te Parawhau, Te Mahurehure - Ngapuhi, and Waitaha descent. She is an artist, designer and independent researcher active in environmental issues from an indigenous perspective in Aotearoa and globally, working with the Waitaha Executive Grandmothers Council and the Common Earth Indigenous Working Group. Last year she founded the online Region Net Positive community platform. A video and performance artist who has exhibited nationally, Tanya has shown with the Circuit agency since 2016 and was artist in residence at Corbans Estate Art Centre 2018-19.
Xin Cheng and Adam Ben-Dror: Inner city resourceful makerspace
Exploring resourceful ways of living and making in the city, this project will provide a makerspace and non-hierarchical 'art school' open to all, focusing on handmade technologies. There will be materials to make things with, including waste from surrounding businesses. The showroom will include a library of useful and enjoyable things which have been made, found and sourced plus locally-sourced tea and snacks, a worm farm, and simple screen-printing facilities with eco/homemade-dyes. Also planned are reading groups and workshops on specific skills such as thrifty book-making, macrame with unconventional materials, and the repurposing of E-Waste. The project will be open to other participants/collaborators running their own workshops related to resourceful living.
Adam Ben-Dror is an artist-inventor currently teaching design at Victoria University Wellington. He recently turned a toy Lamborghini into a tele-presence robot roaming around the city making friends. Collaborating with Xin they made two films on inter-species kinship within Te Whanganui-a-tara and Te Awa Kairangi for the Dowse Art Museum. Adam studied fine arts at the University of Auckland, design at Victoria University Wellington and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Xin Cheng is an artist and researcher currently teaching design at the University of Auckland. She has been researching everyday resourcefulness around the earth since 2007. Recently she has been recording the sound of the dance between wind and trees. Previously she was a co-director of the artist-run space RM in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Xin studied social design at Hamburg University of Fine Arts, Germany, and ecology, psychology and fine arts at The University of Auckland.
Bek Coogan and Heleyni Pratley
These two artists are joining forces to engage the public in their responses to the housing crisis. Heleyni presents The Housing Crisis Community Reflection and Assessment Centre. This builds on Heleyni’s themes of anti-capitalism and community empowerment in her work, including her recent painting ‘We Never Walk Alone Together’, permanently on display in Wellington Trades Hall Museum, and video music work ‘We Survive’.
“Through organising, mentoring and empowering fast food union delegates and members, through workshops, education and struggle," says Heleyni "I’ve seen people stand up to their boss in moments that seemed impossible.”
Bek pushes her responses to the neo-liberal housing crisis that is Aotearoa further by developing on her recent art show We’re all Hostages held at Te Whare Herā, 2020. Here Bek compulsively 'rescued' 100's of shards of Rimu sarking destined for landfill, in a ‘raged’ response to the housing and economic situation. This Rimu wood also calls to the underlying truth of the ecological impacts of settler-colonial land ownership and misuse. Part of the outcome of this solo show was the reality that these issues can’t be dealt with in isolation, so Bek looks forward to this collaboration with Heleyni to get help and support with the ongoing questioning. Can Bek get on the Ladder? What are the options? And how are we even feeling? “Thank goodness for the ‘The Community Housing Crisis Reflection and Assessment Centre ’ “ says Bek.
Heleyni Pratley is a visual and performance artist who worked for Unite Union as an organiser and co-president (2015) for six years. Bek Coogan is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara-based artist and musician, performance artist, whose work orbits the meeting points where real life meets art. At the last bi-annual Palmerston North Mayday Concert 2021, Bek sang with her mum’s political choir, The Brazen Hussies the song ‘Where Have All The Houses Gone..?’
Holli McEntegart: Held Space (working title)
Held Space is a place to examine how community, cultural and familial postpartum care has changed in Aotearoa: how we share our experiences in the time after childbirth, in real time and as oral history; what we know about our lineage's postpartum traditions and experiences; and, how we can “incorporate community care to collectively heal across generations.” By bringing diverse voices into conversation to explore systems of change, Held Space sits at the intersection of birth and reproductive justice activism, public art and social practice.
As an artist McEntegart uses social practice, video, performance, photography and text. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Photography and a Masters of Visual Art & Design from AUT and received an MFA scholarship to study at Carnegie Mellon School of Art, Pittsburgh, USA. She has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and the USA, and after being awarded a fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, took up residence in New York where she exhibited and trained as a Full Spectrum Doula. She has recently relocated back home to Aotearoa.
Julian Oliver: Electromagnetic Geographies
May 2021 (now complete)
In this workshop participants built and used inexpensive antennae with open source software to reveal and study an otherwise unseen world of signal in the city - a richly diverse Electromagnetic Geography. In doing so, participants learnt not only how our invisible interactions with communications infrastructure can be used to study us, but how battles over public space also play out in the spectral domain - a fight for the Spectral Commons and our basic rights of broadcast. Work done and skills learned formed the basis of projects of an artistic, practical or purely hypothetical nature, for show in a 2 week follow-up public exhibition.
Julian Oliver has lectured on the technopolitics of network infrastructure and communications technologies in conferences and festivals throughout Europe and the US, from Princeton and Berkeley, to Transmediale and the ZKM. He has given intensive hands-on workshops on these topics in over a dozen countries worldwide, including summer schools at Weise7 in Berlin, and at the former Soviet spy station 'Little Star' in Latvia. https://julianoliver.com