Remix the City - who won?
Which event, person or team created Sydney’s most groundbreaking physical space, location or landmark and turned it into a creative heartland for all Sydneysiders?
Organised by artist collective Reef Knot and launched as a part of City of Sydney's 2009 Art & About program, I Heart Kings Cross was a community art phenomenon. It took the eminently accessible (if unglamorous) craft of knitting and transformed it into public art in Sydney’s most notorious suburb via weekly workshops that saw locals and artists knitting "grafitti" to hug trees and telegraph poles.
WE heart I♥?X!
Borrowing from (and adding to) the Take Away Shows, Amelia Tovey and Jonathon Wald’s innovative Shoot the Player concept made unplugged music videos using Sydney as the set. By throwing musos into a single shot scenario they presented song, place and person as the ultimate audio-visual tour our city’s most iconic locations.
Reluctant "Situationists" Bababa strive towards useful vandalism. Sydney is their canvas and audience interaction is their aesthetic end point. A self-proclaimed "do everything" collective of artists, Bababa's Soap City used map-engraved soap to lead visitors on a journey that ended with guerrilla bathing. Truly one of 2009's most innovative interrogation of public/private urban spaces in Sydney.
Activist art collective SquatSpace started their ‘bike ‘n’ bus’ Tour of Beauty program in 2005 under the guise of a series of public meetings between residents, artists and those with an interest in the Redfern/Waterloo locale. These open-ended discussions had Tour of Beauty placing communication as central to art, activism, community and space and giving participants a framework for interaction and debate of Sydney issues.
2009’s tour ran as part of There Goes the Neighbourhood.
Back for its second date with Sydney, Festival First Night adopted a theme of “Sydney Dances” and, over no less than seven precincts, showcased over 600 artists. Pretty impressive second date! Cleverly hedging their demographic bets with acts as diverse Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, A-Trak, Mehdi, Santogold, Mr Scruff, Bag Raiders, Uber Lingua and the inimitable Grace Jones as headliner, we took the whole night as a dowry and are now forever betrothed to the free people party that is Festival First Night.
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