“Open for inspection”
Keely Macarow, Neal Haslem, Mim Whiting, Margie McKay and Mick Douglas
27 June → 26 July 2014

Keely Macarow, Neal Haslem, Mim Whiting, Margie McKay and Mick Douglas are members of Untitled Collective, an Australian and Swedish collective of artists, urban, graphic and industrial designers, architects and housing researchers. Members of the collective also include Guy Johnson, RMIT (Australia), Helene Frichot, KTH, Rochus Hinkel and Marcus Knutagard, Lund University (Sweden).

Our objective is to work collaboratively across disciplines to examine issues connected with homelessness and housing stress so that we can collectively move to homefullness: a future where we will have housing for all. Our motivation is to engender discussion about housing stress, affordability and aspiration because we believe that Australian housing requires new and varied options to ensure that everyone living in this country is housed in secure, affordable and sustainable housing.

For Open for Inspection, Keely Macarow, Neal Haslem, Mim Whiting, Margie McKay and Mick Douglas will explore contemporary trends in Australian and Swedish housing and examine how these countries deal with housing stress and homelessness. The artists will investigate how aspirations for housing and home ownership can be signified through objects, material, graphic and video interventions, and create new artworks and public forums for the Front Space at West Space that respond to the aspiration of homefullness (rather than homelessness). Untitled Collective’s Manifesto for Full Housing, and research into contemporary Australian and Swedish housing will be embedded in and inform the artworks and public forums devised for this project. The exhibition will include a level of self-reflexivity with the narratives communicated through the artefacts, objects and video influenced by our own experiences with precarious housing.

Saturday 12th July 2014, 2-4pm: Marcus Knutagard, a Swedish member of Untitled Collective and Housing Researcher from Lund University (Sweden) will speak on his Moral Geographies of Homelessness. Visitors will be encouraged to share their ideas of and experiences with housing with Marcus and artists of the Open for Inspection project over cups of tea around the kitchen table.

Saturday 19th July 2014, 2-4pm: Untitled Collective will perform a live public printingevent that uses the questions and comments arising from the exhibition as material to be converted into graphic narratives and printed in situ.

Wednesday 23rd July 2014, 7-9pm: Untitled Collective will perform a second live print run for Nite Art.

Saturday 26 July 2014, 2-3:30pm: Untitled Collective will host a House Meeting, a public forum about housing, housing stress, homelessness and homefullness. Margie McKay of Untitled Collective and the Coordinator of Urban Design, the City of Whittlesea will facilitate the meeting. Speakers include: Sarah Buckeridge, (Director, Hayball), Heather Holst (CEO, HomeGround Services), Sarah Toohey (Manager, Policy and Communications, Council to Homeless Persons), Keely Macarow and Neal Haslem (Untitled Collective and RMIT University).

For House Meeting, Untitled Collective will facilitate a dialogue with the invited speakers and move into a joint discussion with the audience, who will be encouraged to contribute questions, answers, statements, provocations and stories. The panel discussion will address the ideas embraced in the exhibition, and with a focus on homefullness rather than homelessness.

Untitled Collective develops creative interventions in Australia and Sweden to advocate for Homefullness (rather than homelessness). Their project, Homefullness, was a finalist in the Design Research Institute Challenge: Homelessness exhibition at Federation Square, Melbourne, 14-21 April 2012. Untitled Collective presented the Homefullness roundtable at Fargfabriken, Stockholm, 7 Dec 2012 supported by KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm) and RMIT University (Melbourne).

Keely Macarow is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Postgraduate Research in the School of Art, RMIT University. Keely has worked as a producer, artist and curator for film, video, performance and exhibition projects which have been presented in Australia, the UK, the US, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Sweden, Hungary, France, Scotland and Denmark. Her practice is focused on socially engaged art and the nexus between creative arts, social justice and health and wellbeing. She has worked on a number of art and health projects and is currently developing SOS Emergency Jewellery technologically modified jewellery with Leah Heiss, Paul Beckett and David Mainwaring. She was a Chief Investigator for the Australian Research Council Linkage funded project Designing Sound for Health and Wellbeing with industry partner: St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, to ascertain the effect of sound and music on the health and wellbeing of Emergency Department patients (2008-2011). For this project the artists and medical researchers from the School of Art. RMIT University and St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne produced sound compositions to investigate the effects of sound and music on the health and wellbeing of Emergency Department patients. Keely was producer of Northern Void, an audio-visual cinema project (Philip Brophy and Philip Samartzis – Director and composers) which premiered in February 2007 at ACMI, Her curatorial projects include the CCP commissioned digital media art exhibition, Elastic, which toured Victorian regional galleries during 2003-2004 and to PICA (2004). Keely produced the kinetic installation Projection Machines, with artist Paul Rodgers, which was exhibited at Mass Gallery, Melbourne in April 2001.

Neal Haslem is a creative practitioner, lecturer and researcher at RMIT University in the area of communication design. His practice involves working with other creative arts practitioners on public and performative art projects within communities. He works collaboratively to creatively express shared concepts, aspirations and understandings thereby producing material investigations which both explore and propose possible collective futures. He has extensive experience within the community cultural development, fine art and jewellery fields. His creative practice includes print media, installation, interactive and motion-based outcomes. He is a member of the community arts group stART Community Art, working in 2012 with members of Tetoamatoa, a disabled peoples organisation from the Kiribati Islands in a series of collaborative, participatory workshops funded through AusAid. In 2010 Neal participated in the Australia Council for the Arts funded project ‘Pieces, Suicide the Aftermath’, collaboratively producing exhibition work with suicide affected family members. Neal has worked extensively with another member of the ‘Open for Inspection’ team Mick Douglas on the projects; LiveHouse (2009), W-11 tram: an art of journeys’ (2006), Tramjatra: imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by tramways’ (2005), and ‘ride-on-dinner’ (2006-2009). Neal gained his undergraduate degree at the School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart in 1991. In 2004 he started his practice-led research degrees at RMIT University, completing his Masters in 2007 (The practice and the community: a proposition for the possible contribution of communication design to public space) and his Doctorate in 2011 (Communication design and the other: investigating the intersubjective in practice).

Mick Douglas is a transdisciplinary artist whose socially engaged and live art projects explore inter-relationships between aesthetic experiences of mobility and hospitality, cultural change practices and sustainability. He has presented work internationally, including the Melbourne International Arts Festival, New Zealand Fringe Festival, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Doors of Perception (Amsterdam + New Delhi), and in Kolkata India and Karachi Pakistan. Projects include ‘W-11 Tram: an art of journeys’ first commissioned by the cultural festival of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games; the art activism project ‘tramjatra: imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by tramways’ (also a book of the same name); ‘ride-on-dinner’, an urban meal adventure exploring relations between the human body, a swarming social body and the body of the city; ‘LiveHouse’, a mobile performance platform exploring expressions of cosmopolitanism; and ‘Container Walk’, an interactive live art performance exploring conditions of social exchange and ecological systems. He holds a doctoral degree (2010) titled ‘carriage: cultural transports and transformations of a socially engaged art practice’. As senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia, he supervises PhD creative practiced-based research across art/performance/design. He was a Visiting Scholar / Artist at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2013.

Mim Whiting studied painting and then documentary filmmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts. She has produced and directed a wide range of video works including documentaries, community art projects, oral histories, animations, digital storytelling and poetry videos. She has collaborated with performance artists, poets, composers, writers, the homeless, disabled, prisoners, children and many others. Her work embodies a painters eye for detail and visual storytelling and explores the music of authentic voices.
Mim’s projects include: the visual component for the cantata Underworld Songs by Martin Friedel, performed by Astra Music, the Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne and funded by the Australia Council (2013). Don’t Flush, a documentary that explored the rediscovery of composting toilets at music festivals (2013). She worked on the Stories of Survival video storytelling project funded by Vic Health and produced by the Humanitarian Crisis Hub which documents stories from survivors of war and conflict (2012); as a writer and in video production for the community exhibition project which marked 10 years since the Tampa incident, Just Like Us at the Multicultural Hub, Melbourne (2012), theatre support for production and exhibition, Somebody’s Daughter Theatre at the Dame Phyllis Frost corrections centre, Victoria (2010). She produced the video, Has Anybody Seen My Dream with St Paul’s College as part of the Arts Victoria Artists in Schools (2010). She worked on the multimedia production by Alicia Sometimes, Elemental presented at the Melbourne Planetarium, the Melbourne International Festival and funded by Arts Victoria (2009). Mim worked on Homeless Not Artless, The Big Issue: spoken word performance & video for the Homeless World Cup and presented at ACMI, funded by the City of Melbourne and the Australia Council, (2008). She was the director, editor, writer of video resources for the schoolroom project, Generation F (2008). Mim worked on the Maintaining Mental Health project (2008) and the Being Muslim in C21st Australia (2009) project for Video Education Australia. She worked on Opening Doors, video collaborations by youth in mental health recovery funded by Vic Health and presented at Counihan Gallery (2007), she ran Animates @ ArtPlay, stop frame animation workshops with children, City of Melbourne (2007 & 2009). Mim presented Flush, site specific performance & poetry in public lavatories for the Melbourne Fringe festival and funded by Arts Victoria (2001) and her short video, Salacity was screened on Eat Carpet, SBS TV (2000).

Margie McKay has extensive experience in the fields of architecture, urban design and strategic development. She has played a leading role in the formulation, preparation and delivery of strategies and projects that have significantly contributed to the improvement of the public environment in Australia and New Zealand. As Coordinator of Urban Design, City of Whittlesea currently leads the Urban Design team for City of Whittlesea, one of the fastest growing municipalities in Australia. Her work focuses on developing plans and strategies for urban environments based on social and environmental principles. Margie has had ongoing involvement in design education by combining professional practice with teaching in the Architecture Department at the University of Melbourne.
Margie’s recent key projects include: Wollert Precinct Structure Plan – Draft Plan (2013); Docklands Public Realm Plan; Flinders Street Station Competition brief (2012); Melbourne Metro 1 - Urban Renewal Opportunities Study(2009); Wellington Urban Character Assessment (2008); and theNelson Richmond Intensification Study (2007). Margie received aCommendation, Planning Institute of Australia Victorian Awards for Docklands Public Realm Plan in the Best Planning Idea Large Project category (2013 and theBoffa Miskell Top Project 2008 -Wellington Urban Character Assessment (2008).As part of The Untitled she exhibitedHomefullness, (The Untitled), Design Research Institute Challenge: Homelessness, Federation Square, Melbourne, 14-21 April 2012. Margie’s publications include‘Choosing Environmental Materials’, Wellbeing, Issue 88, (2002), Book Reviews, BDP Environment Design Guide, RAIA, (2001) and ‘Home Offices’, Greenhouse Living, Spring 2001.

Open for inspection speakers: Dr Marcus Knutagård is a Swedish housing researcher and Course Director for dissertation courses on the BSc and MA in Social Work programme at Lund University (Sweden). Marcus is currently working on a research project implementing Housing First in Sweden and and on a post doctoral project: The Moral Geography of Social Work Practice. He is interested in how social work practice is organised and has studied category formation in the field of Homelessness. Marcus has published widely on housing and homelessness including the article “Not by the Book: The Emergence and Translation of Housing First in Sweden", European Journal of Homelessness, (with Arne Kristiansen).

Sarah Buckeridge coordinates Hayball’s urban design projects, including the master planning of new communities and strategic urban design projects for both the government and private sector. She has a strong interest in the future form of the city and how we can effectively respond to challenges, such as developing affordable housing models and creating well-connected communities. Hayball is one of Australia’s largest design practices, whose work reflects a belief in an architectural agenda that is socially responsive and materially responsible.

Heather Holst has worked in the housing sector since 1989. Heather joined HomeGround in 2009 as General Manager Client Services where she led the client services teams across all sites and programs. Heather is passionate about ending homelessness and is committed to leading HomeGround in working towards this mission. Her housing experience spans homelessness delivery, tenancy advocacy, homelessness policy, program development, research, rural homelessness service coordination in both the non-profit sector and government since 1989. Heather co-authored the Opening Doors initiative and has contributed to key Victorian housing and homelessness innovations including the coordination of all services, transitional housing, standards, data, rights-based approaches and sector training. Heather has a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne. She has published several scholarly articles and book chapters and has taught history at Australian Catholic University, including in the Clemente program for people who have been homeless.

Sarah Toohey began work with the Council to Homeless Persons (CHP) in October 2012. She is responsible for leading CHP’s policy and strategic communications efforts. Sarah was most recently the campaign manager for Australians for Affordable Housing (AAH); a national coalition of community and housing organisations established to campaign for policy change at the federal level and to ensure that all Australians can get access to affordable housing. Prior to her AAH role, Sarah worked as a policy officer at the Victorian Council of Social Service doing policy research and running campaigns on issues affecting low income and disadvantaged Victorians; particularly utilities and housing policy.