Description

Local Positioning Systems, a soundscape by Sonia Leber and David Chesworth finds resonance in the Victorian Quaker Centre, whose re-designed gathering space fosters shared listening under an overhead portal to the world. The soundscape is created from the voices of Melburnians experiencing homelessness, who reflect on systems of support, personal safety and self-determination with clarity and insight.They consider the right to occupy a place while navigating systemic relocations and drawing strength from peer solidarity.

The event includes a participatory drawing project by Simon Grennan and Ilona Jetmar aimed at prompting audience responses around homelessness and housing precarity.

Presented by the Deakin University HOME Strategic Research and Innovation Centre and Public Exchange Bureau Research Group, with original recordings drawn from peer-produced radio program Homeless in Hotels podcast as featured on radio station 3CR.

What's On

Over Friday afternoon and Saturday, gather under the portal to hear Sonia Leber and David Chesworth’s six-channel sound work exploring themes of displacement, resilience and the right to housing, drawn from interviews with those experiencing homelessness. Audiences are invited to further participate in a drawing project by Simon Grennan and Ilona Jetmar, capturing themselves in data drawings that reflect on home and insecurity. The two-day event invites deep listening, discussion, and creative responses to urgent social issues in a space specifically designed to encourage contemplation.

On Saturday at 2pm, join for a panel discussion: 'Security, Surveillance, and the Street: The recent criminalisation of homelessness’

From COVID-19 lockdowns to a planned rough-sleeping ban in Port Melbourne, recent years have seen an evolution in efforts to criminalise homelessness in Greater Melbourne. To contextualise the soundscape and drawing project, a panel of advocates and peers with lived experience explores the recent history of policies to exclude unhoused people from public spaces, building on the work of Homeless in Hotels, documenting homeless Melburnians’ experiences of lockdown (which brought emergency hotel accommodation, but also made rough sleeping effectively illegal). 

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