Artist as Family: November 2011

Thursday, 24 November 2011

Creative Commons: Water Commons

Patrick has drawn a new map to show our findings. If Melbourne is serious about being zero-carbon then bottled water (and anything disposable) has to rapidly become an outmoded commodity.

Please feel free to distribute this map widely (copyright is just another form of privatisation).

Thanks to Designscope for scanning.

Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Key Audit Findings

We found our first bubbler of the day near the corner of Lonsdale and Spencer streets at 8.35am.

We found that to make sure we didn't miss any of the bubblers in the chaos of the city we had to slow right down.

We found the entire contents of somebody's home out in the street. What a lucky country we live in that so much waste goes unwanted.

We found our friend Brett who joined us on our audit. We found him at the lovely Kinfolk café, which is staffed by volunteers and whose profits go to a selection of different charities.

We found that although we only drink rain water at home, we loved drinking a toast to all the working bubblers we came across.

We found that after a while we even started acting like water bubblers.

We found that we started seeing bubblers even when there weren't any.

We found a few over-zealous bubblers.

We found lots of important reasons to carry out our audit.

We found wheelchair accessible bubblers,

dog accessible bubblers

and bee accessible bubblers.

We found the wasteful remains of the winning entry in the 2011 Melbourne Urban Prize for sculpture.

We found bubblers being repaired.

We found bubblers from great heights.

We found some very brave people at the Occupy Melbourne protest; people willing to stand up to the corporate greed that is killing our planet.

We found some great examples of people growing their own food.

We found people will go to great lengths to get a drink of water.

Overall what we found was very positive compared with Patrick's findings from four years ago.

We found 46 bubblers in the CBD region, 19 more than last time.

We found 39 working bubblers, 21 more than last time.

When we enquired at the City of Melbourne council offices we were told that on average there are 788,000 people who use the city every day, 77,400 more than last time.

We found 1 working bubbler per 20,205 people whereas last time it was 1 working bubbler per 40,000 people.

Congratulations are in order for the City of Melbourne. It's fantastic to see that they have started to take the issue of bottled water pollution seriously. We encourage them to continue their great work by providing even more water bubblers for the people of Melbourne who are concerned about drinking just and free water.

And lastly we found that walking over 15km auditing Melbourne's bubblers sure did make us sleepy.

Friday, 18 November 2011

Water Bubbler Audit

Four years ago, Patrick spent a day walking through Melbourne auditing the drinking water fountains in the CBD. His walk revealed that there was one working bubbler per 40,000 people in the city. He charted his findings on a map which he made freely available:

This coming Monday the 21st November, Artist as Family will spend the day retracing Patrick's walk through the CBD as we re-audit the city’s bubblers. We want to find out if the City of Melbourne is still committed to encouraging bottled water pollution or whether they’ve begun to transition to a sustainable and just free water supply by repairing all the broken bubblers and installing new ones for thirsty summer city dwellers.

Did you know that for Australians to drink bottled water, over 500,000 barrels of oil are required every year??

If you live in Melbourne, please feel free to join us for any part of our walk. We will have a mobile with us, so please call or text to lend us support or to find out our whereabouts: 0418 523 308.

Stay tuned for the findings of our audit.

About Us

Hello! We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr. We live in Daylesford, Australia on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University on Djaara peoples' country.

We base our creative practice on our concept of permapoesis, which simply means permanent making or regenerative living – an antidote to disposable culture. We practice an art that participates in what it represents; an art of social warming in an era of global warming. Food ethics and politics are central to our practice. Generating food that brings human and ecological health and global justice is our creative call to arms, within the sphere of the local. We teach a unique skill set of radical neopeasant homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs). We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, poets, artists, video makers who also make music, but mostly we're a family who belong to a bloody great community and therefore we're much more than the sum of our parts.

Past and current projects

Artist as Family have conducted a number of fruitful projects in the past including '17 Days' (2009), commissioned by the Lock-up Cultural Centre in Newcastle and 'Food Forest' (2010–), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, our work was featured in the international anthology of ecological art, 'Art & Ecology Now' (2014), and we wrote the Art of Free Travel (2015) about our 400 day cycle adventure to Cape York and home again in Central Victoria, which was shortlisted for an ABIA in 2016. We continue to give talks to sustainability groups, art schools, university students and community organisations. We teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs) from our home, at Tree Elbow University, which is the site for The School of Applied Neopeasantry in Daylesford, Victoria.

17 Days (2009)

'17 Days' involved foraging for anthropogenic waste along the coastline and throughout the city of Newcastle. Day after day we carried out the same simple task of walking or bike riding to collect countless bags of rubbish. We swam, played in the sand, picnicked, rested, communed with locals, gazed (as inlanders) in awe at the sea and picked up other people’s discarded refuse. After 17 days we had amassed a monumental pile of industrial food and drink packaging, which we exhibited at the Lock-up Cultural Centre as simply: the everyday detritus of hypertechnocivility as collected by a family on holiday.

Food Forest (2010–)

'Food Forest' is a public artwork that doubles as a community garden, a work that aims to foreground biodiversity and demonstrate that materially art can be generative, can be a resource unto itself, rather than just an extractor or exploiter of resources to make market desirable products. In other words art can be generative contiguous with ecological functioning. Food Forest is therefore a work that attempts to blur the traditional western line between art and that estranging term ‘nature’.