I acknowledge and pay respect to custodians – past present and emerging – on Dharawal land where I live and conduct this creative practice. I extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Sovereignty never ceded.

Bianca Hester

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Bianca Hester is an artist, writer and educator engaged in place-based practice through artistic research. Her work investigates entanglements between colonial inheritance, extraction, environmental crisis, evolution and extinction evident within locations across the Australian continent. Employing relational feminist methodologies, she combines experimental fieldwork, engaging the geologic record (in archives and in situ), embodied site-writing, sculptural production, collaboration and performed actions to develop projects that unpack the material conditions of specific places, resulting in an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of interlocutors and participants.

A world, fully accessible by no living being Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture
(2011)

A world fully accessible by no living being comprises three components, being: a series of propositions for engaging the urban environment, an architectural intervention, and a printed broadsheet. Weaving through this multiplicity is the desire to experiment with the limits that regulate urban spaces and to provoke strategies for addressing the ways that these spaces are constructed, cultivated, regulated and negotiated. The project was conceived in three inter-related parts:

Propositions
The propositions documented in the broadsheet temporarily occupy several sites around Melbourne. Each proposition seeks to open up possibilities for considering forms of engagement and occupation. The propositions are actualised in various ways: some have been improvised and documented prior to the exhibition, some remain as plans articulated through the use of text and image and some are given form by becoming actions that occur during the exhibition. Witnessing and participating in the propositions occurred in a range of ways, by invitation or incidentally.


A printed broadsheet
The broadsheet is the primary site for encountering the multiplicity of propositions. It collects these together and operates as a publication, a mapping, and a document that articulates the ways each proposition has taken shape or been enacted, and a timetable of actions. This broadsheet is available at the wall built on Federation Square and is free to whoever wants to take it.

A link to a copy of the online broadsheet is here.


An architectural intervention
The cinder-block wall built at Federation Square becomes the physical nexus for the project and forms the backdrop for the performance of some of the project’s propositions. The wall also acts as a support-structure for the presentation and distribution of the broadsheet.

This project was developed with assistance from the following people:
Kay Abude, Akira Akira, Appiah Annan, Sebastian Avila, Holly Bennet, Terri Bird, Bill Coley, Anthony Cribb, Veronica Cust, Charlotte Day, Figo Gamachu, Kathleen Gonzalez, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Kym Haines, Jason Heller, Dermot Henry, Ian Hester, Ying Lan-Dan, Nicholas Mangan, Vikki McInnes, Scott Mitchell, Callum Morton, Geoff Newton, Spiros Panigirakis, Lucretia Quintanilla, Reuben Heller-Quintanilla, Geoff Robinson, Jonas Ropponen, Julius-Bright Sackey, Brian Scales, Saskia Schut, Andrew Sinclair, Simone Slee, Deam Smith, Charlie Sofo, Steven Sparrey, Peter Swinkles, Brendon Taylor, Warren Taylor, Isadora Vaughan, Simon Warrender, Benjamin Woods, Makiko Yammamoto, Zachary Zegbedski, Staff and Students of VCA Sculpture and Spatial Practice, the artists from A-coop


Cinder-blocks used in the building of the wall generously supplied by Boral Melbourne, through the support of Garry Stephen and Garry McCarthy. They were recycled into a private retaining wall at the end of the project.


Wilson parking supported this project by making their carpark available as a site for the Hoops performance on Tuesday November 8th, 2011

Anthropogenic, Archive, Basalt, Brick, Bronze, Colonial continuums, Coal, Concrete, Cosmic, Deep time, Digging, Dirt, Dust, Embodiment, Extractivism, Extinctions, Floor, Fossil, Fragment, Geologies, Groundwork, Installation, Materiality, Object, People, Performance, Permian, Place, Plant life, Process, Meteorite, Moving, Moving image, Rubbings, Sandstone, Sculpture, Singular objects, Site, Sociality, Steel, Still image, Textual, Triassic, Walking, Wall.