We are thrilled to announce the launch of a special issue of Visual Communication: Recombinant Ecologies in the City. Volume 19 Issue 3, August 2020. The editorial is open access. The contributions to this issue show that experimental visual communication can bear witness to practices and performance of cities by birds, bacteria, plants, atmospheres and people. Visual communication can also generate living archives of recombinant ecologies, contributing to […]

This book, Marrickville Backyards, was necessary preparatory reading for our field work in Marrickville. Published in 2001 by Marrickville Community History Group, with only a small print run, this book is not easy to get your hands on. We found it through Sydney’s much-loved Gould’s Book Arcade. Our second hand copy comes with a note on […]

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 […]

I recently attended a workshop on Survival, as part of ‘Hacking the Anthropocene‘. The event was located at the Canoe Club on the Cooks River, just near Tempe Sation: The River River Canoe Club of New South Wales. I walk past this club almost every day and was very curious about what was inside. The […]

  Last weekend, I found myself at the Other Worlds Zine Fair at Marrickville Town Hall. I was shopping, not selling, which was quite a treat. If you are not sure of the significance of zines, a good place to start is Jessica Lymn’s thesis ‘Queering the archives: the practice of zines’ which is available for download […]

I ran into a friend yesterday who has been following #mappingedges through Instagram. Although he lives only 10 km away, because of traffic, poor public transport connection, and generally busy lives, we barely see each other and he hasn’t been able to join any of our walks. He had noticed the images of papayas growing on Marrickville’s edges and wanted to know if they were the kind that were good in Som Tam, Green Papaya Salad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_papaya_salad).