This week’s activity has 2 parts: Part 1: Watch: Plant Maps as Treasure Hunts https://youtu.be/2GE1PH_TQa0 Try to answer these questions: If you are in Australia, what country are you on? If you are not in Australia, what people have lived on the land you are now on? What can a map do, aside from helping […]

The Planty Bookshelf is a socially engaged creative project consisting of an installation of a curated, multidisciplinary bookshelf of UTS library’s holdings on selected plants and three mapping walks inside UTS library and in the surrounding neighbourhood. The walks will be held in spring and summer 2019.

I was recently part of a special issue of M/C Journal on Walking. Of particular interest to our work is Chantelle Bayes’ article ‘The Cyborg Flâneur: Reimagining Urban Nature through the Act of Walking’. Bayes draws on the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway to examine how the urban walking figure might be […]

This spring I visited a variety of gardens in UK, from grand National Trust estate properties to council estates plots. Everywhere I saw plant-human collaborations to green our environment and lives.

Cities in Java have many obstacles to walking. Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, is no exception: Footpaths are difficult to find, non-existent, or in disrepair. Traffic is ruthless. Maps are inaccurate. The weather is oppressively hot. Despite this situation, jalan-jalan (walking without a specified aim) is still the best way to explore the city and […]

This post is not exactly about reading books, although books are present, but about reading an installation and a major art event through the lens of permaculture. The photo above is from the project Unpacking My Library at the 57th Venice Biennale. Inspired by Walter Benjiamin’s 1931 essay, this project allowed all participating artists (including dead […]

I just finished reading ‘A Philosophy of Walking’ for obvious reasons. Mapping Edges are avid walkers, and philosophers of walking. The book is a wonderful meditation on what walking does for thinking. Gros begins with the proposition that walking is not a sport, and then he meanders through history (albeit mostly Western male history), telling […]

This is a short documentation of the first Mapping Edges walk around Marrickville while in residence at Frontyard in March 2016. It shows some key elements of our methodology: we walk slowly, and analyse plant life and the way plants design the urban environment. Also it often rains.

We presented a paper at the conference Tropics of the Imagination in Singapore last week, and took occasion to think through what kind of tropical imaginaries are generated by plants. We started by locating our work in Gadigal country, specifically in Marrickville, explained our methodology, introduced which tropical tropes are associated with plants, and concluded following […]