BodyPlaceProject collective is pleased to deliver a 4-year program entitled Making Sense of Place, bringing site-responsive performance and participatory arts to places and communities across the Yarra Ranges region, east of Melbourne/Narrm.

The program will offer place-based experiences engaging with themes relevant to our times, such as climate resilience, social inequity and reckoning with colonial legacies. The experiences will include performances, exhibitions and other artistic outcomes, as well as deepening collaborative connections between artists, First Nations custodians and other experts, to generate and revitalise art practices and foster new understandings of place.

The projects bring together leading contemporary arts practitioners and foreground First Nations culture to consider how we can encounter places with care and nuance. Outcomes created in Yarra Ranges are intended for audiences both locally and further afield, and the program will include forums for discourse between local and international artists and practice-led thinkers.

Projects include: Sensing Country, a series of walks guided by Wurundjeri knowledge holders; On Country/In Residence, an artists’ walking residency with exhibition outcome, ngurrak-al marram-u / body of the mountain; and the forthcoming CONFLUENCE at Coranderrk.

Making Sense of Place is proudly supported by Yarra Ranges Council through a Partnership grant. On Country/In Residence and ngurrak-al marram-u / body of the mountain were supported by a Yarra Ranges Council Arts and Heritage grant and ngurrak barring art and cultural trail and assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.