Water Lore: Learning from the Drylands

Exhibition Opening | 6pm, Friday 3 May 2019

Curated by Gini Lee & Antonia Besa this exhibition presents an intensive deep mapping project as a medium for shared knowledge, novel systems and sustainable ecologies for arid regions, aimed at benefiting urban communities facing drying Anthropocene conditions.

Based on interdisciplinary secondary research together with field work / and site explorations this exhibition maps two major Australian river systems, the regulated Murray Darling and the unregulated Cooper Creek, to identify ‘hotspots’ for future cultural water strategy and design projects for communities and landscapes.

Mapping at large scale conveys the scale and beauty of our critical river systems and designated hotspots reveal the contemporary conditions of places formed by access to and deeply held values for water.

The exhibition provides a large-scale water map of dryland Australian landscapes formed by water overlaid with contemporary and historic water values and installations. Each ‘hotspot’ where critical conditions overlap becomes a place for possible intervention through design and communication of water-led change actions.

Image: Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre by Antonia Besa; Map sources: Geoscience Australia, NASA and Google Earth.

Part of the BE–150: celebrating built environments education at the University of Melbourne 2019 program.