Thresholds Talk #1: Subterranean Imaginaries

Join Vanessa Berry, Marilu Melo Zurita and Eugenia Zoubtchenko to discuss what is so compelling about underground spaces?, why are we interested in what is hidden under the surface of the city? and what does it taste, smell and feel like to explore the underground?

Artists Julia Davis, Lisa Jones and the curator Claire Taylor will also be present.

DETAILS

Date: Saturday 23 January

Time: 1:30 - 3 pm (30 mins of gallery tour followed by the talk)

CovidSafe Venue: Lecture Theatre 250, Wilkinson Building, 148 City Rd, Darlington NSW 2008. For visitor guide please visit our website.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Vanessa Berry is a writer who works with history, memory and archives. Her work draws on official and unofficial archives to examine expressions of memory in places and physical objects. She is the author of the award-winning Mirror Sydney: an atlas of reflections, and also the Mirror Sydney blog and podcast. She is the author of the memoirs Ninety9 and Strawberry Hills Forever and the zine series I am a Camera. Vanessa is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.

Dr Marilu Melo Zurita is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her research has spanned different key areas of geographical scholarship – including groundwater governance, subterranean urban spaces and peri-urban disaster management. Marilu is the founder of Think Deep Australia, an interdisciplinary group interested in the integrated and sustainable uses of what exists underground/underwater. She is also the leader of the Urban Integration Activity Group for the International Tunneling and Association Committee on Underground Space (ITACUS).

Marilu’s current research focuses on the political economy of tunnelling: how the underground has emerged as a significant site for urban development, thus presenting a pressing need to understand its materialities (e.g. groundwater, soils), its multiple conceptualisations (e.g. the underground as an empty void) and the challenges and opportunities imposed by urban processes.

Eugenia Zoubtchenko is a producer and placemaker with a background in architecture. She has a fascination with people's relationships with the urban and natural landscapes in which they live. She likes to make audio as an excuse to explore places and meet people that she's never encountered before. In 2018, she was the winner of the Wheeler Centre’s "So You Think You Can Pod" competition to develop the podcast series “Terra", which explores the ground beneath our feet, subterranean landscapes, buried histories and hidden infrastructure.

Image: Julia Davis and Lisa Jones, Thresholds – a chorus #13/11/17, 2017. Unique print on archival paper, 100 x 150 cm. Photograph: Richard Glover.

This work was made with the support of The Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, Sydney Trains and GREYSPACE.