“As the first step in creating a vision for the public spaces of this site, we spoke with the community surrounding the Danks Street South Precinct so that local peoples’ stories, values and ideas could help shape the future public spaces to be developed. We present our findings as a set of fundamental desires, those which cut across the conflicts and locate a common base from which to build a set of concepts. We take these not as ‘options’ but as mandatory guiding principles, and measures against the concepts and eventual physical results will be judged.”
– Heidi Axelsen and Huge Moline, MAPA.
MAPA are an art and architecture collaborative working between the social and the spatial. Directors Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline work across architecture, installation, social process and situated public art. They make site-specific devices, discursive machines and social infrastructures. The form their work takes depends on its context, and has so far included: personalised vehicles, adaptable shelters, handmade maps, soluble animals, edible cities, a story-collecting tea cart and a galvanised-steel park shelter that can predict the weather. These lean devices actively engage people to question, understand and act upon the built and political structures which frame our lives. Axelsen and Moline are members and co-founders of Sydney-based collaborative design collective The Lot. Together they have built and exhibited work in various locations across Asia and Australia.
Recently, MAPA have been developing several architectural and urban projects including a public space project with City of Sydney.
Learn more about MAPA.
