Cartographies of the Imagination

Salon 

22 July 2021


On the evening of Thursday 22 July, we hosted a creative salon: an experimental evening of drawing and conversation.

This was an open opportunity for artists, architects and other creatives to participate in our collaborative drawing project - Cosmocartos - and to explore the exhibition and gardens by night.

Our nocturnal explorations into map-making experimented with different ways of perceiving and translating space through weird and wonky drawing processes with found and made materials, inviting quick-fire, large-scale and experimental expressions in mark-making. A night of anticipating the unexpected and charting the uncharted.

 

Drawing Laboratory 

The salon was part of the Drawing Laboratory: A series of experimental workshops exploring how we navigate, percieve and translate the world around us through drawing.

Through a series of evening salons, day and weekend workshops, we invited school children and youth groups, art and architecture students, artists, makers, growers and other creatives to participate in a giant collaborative map of the imagination. The map was drawn, redrawn and re-re-drawn over the course of the festival, by the eyes, hands and imaginations of many.

With a multi-disciplinary approach to speculative drawing and map-making practices at all different scales, the Drawing Laboratory uncovered, interpreted and reimagined the hidden secrets and stories around us; exploring how we experience place, both individually and as a collective. Experimenting with different drawing processes, found and made materials and engaging all our senses, each workshop traced, translated and re-imagined a new layer each responding to the ideas and drawings of the last. Through an additive and open-ended process, together we built, grew and populated the cities, gardens and mindscapes of our collective imagination. Together, we drew Cosmocartos. 

The Drawing Laboratory collaborative map was exhibited in the greenhouses as it emerged over the course of the festival. Its official inauguration was on our last day - Friday 30 July, where we invited all participants to celebrate their part in it’s making.