Heidi Axelsen

Sydney

A$4,550

of $2,000 targettime left

Successful on 30th May 2013 at 2:00AM.

WELCOME!

The Lot has been invited to create new site specific work for the Underbelly Arts Lab and Festival 2013, taking place on the amazing Cockatoo Island BUT we need your help to do it!!

Every dollar you put towards this project to help us reach our target will be matched, which means for every dollar you give, you're giving us two!

We have put together a range of hand crafted rewards and experiences which we hope you find enticing enough to support our project.

THE SITE:

COCKATOO ISLAND: RETIREMENT VILLAGE OF THE GODS.

There is a huge object floating in Fitzroy dock. It bobs gently, tethered by thick ropes, it looks as though it has long ago given up trying to escape, its head a nest of seagulls, its belly covered by weed. Around the perimeter of the dock stand a motley collection of other great machines looking on, arms broken, heads missing, pitted with rust.

The gargantuan machines of Cockatoo Island are a particular source of fascination for us. Awe-inspiring, mystic yet sad, somehow defeated, made redundant, slowly turning into museum pieces, like brawny old men feeling useless in retirement.

Our project seeks to engage with and resist their decline into sterilized artifacts by engaging with their enormous potential as imaginative infrastructures. Harnessing their massiveness, intricacy, specificity to generate new histories, narratives and perhaps even new machines.

WHAT YOUR DOLLARS WILL DO:

With your support, we will construct a range of on-site interventions which animate, substantiate and make operable the fake histories and new potentials. Rather than displacing one set idea of the machines with another, the aim of the interventions will be to point to the core mystery of these incredible objects and provide the audience with a new infrastructure by which it reimagine them. Through ongoing conversations with audiences throughout the lab the interventions will shift, and evolve, incorporating and generating new realities and understandings.

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

1. Pledge money and claim your reward. Remember, your support will double!

2. Share this around your networks. Email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

3. Come out to see the work at Underbelly Arts Lab and Festival. It’s on Cockatoo Island, which is beautiful.

WHO IS THE LOT?

The Lot is a Sydney-based collective working across the fields of art, architecture, urbanism and research.

We design buildings, games, public machines: personalised vehicles, adaptable shelters, hand-made maps, soluble animals, edible cities, discursive infrastructure, and so on. Through these interventions we ask questions about the much larger structures which frame our lives, scratching beneath the surface and imagining what an alternative might look like.

We operate in a wealth of cultural contexts locally and abroad such as: Sydney, Melbourne, Pitjantjatjara Lands, Berlin, Rome, Bangkok, Manilla, Iloilo, Suva, Lihir Island PNG, Katmandu and Bhopal.

Fundamental to our practice are deep collaborations with the people who actually use the places we design for. We join with community organisations, activist groups and people in the street to pursue interests outside of the existing power structure.

In this way we collaborate with a massively diverse array of institutions, groups and individuals. With them we produce work responding to the various contradictions, relationships and opportunities in our shared built environment.