Chart Collective have launched a new project
Melbourne not-for-profit publisher Chart Collective is inviting submissions of anonymous true micro-stories set in the Melbourne’s CBD for their I Was Here project. Founding editor Jocelyn Richardson tells us more.
So often as I retrace paths I’ve walked through the city, tumultuous memories come back to me. Passing greasy bins in laneways, crossing the tram tracks, heading up the hill to the Parisian end, ducking into a bookshop, and stopping next door for a beer at the counter, I think of friendships that have begun, affairs that have ended, and the solitude of adulthood.
Melbourne’s CBD is laid thick with a multitude of experiences, and I have a feeling many of these were intensified by the buzz of the city, the exposure to the crowds, and the centrality of this place in many of our lives. Maybe also by the booze, or the night; people’s industriousness, the long hours and obnoxious commerce; or, for those visiting, the disorientation, or helplessness, or hope.
Our actions are theatrical in the city. Think of the way we act with a lover on a crowded street, intimate and oblivious, like the couple in Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting’, who are “leaning over the balustrade with the curious lack of self-consciousness lovers have, as if the importance of the affair they are engaged on claims without question the indulgence of the human race”. Then again, perhaps their story ends when it’s evening and they’re about the part ways and because of the audience they don’t say what they long to.
The public nature of these spaces can’t protect us from private moments of despair. Humiliation can be heightened. Strangers and authorities can prove irritable, aloof and worse. I can’t help but think how unsafe the recent Operation Fortitude made everyone in this city feel. In so many ways our public spaces have lost touch with the reality of people’s desires and vulnerability, and the moments that make our lives profound.
I Was Here is a chance for the community to take authorship of the city’s narratives. We want to hear all the city’s stories. Between now and Monday 5 October, Chart Collective are inviting everyone from the community to submit anonymous true stories (300 characters or less) about experiences they’ve had in Melbourne’s CBD. Chosen stories will be printed on posters and hung near where each story took place between 12 - 18 October, creating a multi-site publication which overlays the city’s exterior with the community’s interior lives. A map of the story sites will also be published online.
I Was Here is part of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects festival This Public Life, who invited Chart to respond the prompts: Love + Longing, Life + Death, Participation + Spectacle. It takes place on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.
