The Everyday Imaginarium, Melbourne

Are you fatigued by Climate Change? In need of a Personal Environmental Audit? Perhaps an Environmental Tarot and Charka Reading is your cure, or a consultation with our very own Plant Doctor?

The Everyday Imaginarium is a treasure trove filled with provocations and alternative green medicine. As part of Going Nowhere Festival, book a one on one consultation with advice from environmental wizards, local oracles and serene storytellers, all experts who will set up shop to share their tangential knowledge and expertise with you. 

The Everyday Imaginarium is a new age spectacular filled with Everyday Experts showcasing alternative approaches and sustainable ways to living, including:

– Tom Doig: climate change counselling
– Stephen Mushin: rewilding in urban environment consultations
– Davina Adamson: Pica (digesting soil-like substrates) workshops
– Sam Hoffman: methane, polyethylene and YouTube environmental audits
– Bob Reid: plant doctor advice and consultations
– Sylvie Leber: environmental tarot and charka readings
– Emily Ballantyne-Brodie: advice on greening your life, home & spirit
– Marjorie Barnett: life drawings with resident chook
– Uncle Larry Walsh: country, environment & spirit animal storytelling.

Presented for Going Nowhere Festival at Art House, Melbourne. Saturday 22 November 2014.

Tristan Meecham’s live art work The Everyday Imaginarium created a space for the utopian and fantastical alongside the everyday.  Meecham curated nine sages and storytellers who, over the course of the weekend, became a kind of intimate community fair under a shaded balcony at North Melbourne Town Hall designed by Yetti Turnball. With glasses of Pimms in hand, audience-participants were gently encouraged to choose from a menu of one-on-one conversational experiences.

Popular choices were environmental Tarot reading with Sylvie Leber and life drawing sessions with Marjorie Barnett and her pet chicken Blackberry. Both Leber and Barnett are members of the Council on the Aging (Victoria) Green Sages program; the Green Sages were involved in a number of Going Nowhere projects.

I participated in a highly amusing and personal audit of my carbon footprint with Sam Hoffman (while at 230 points my footprint is less than the average 300, a sustainable footprint is 100 points; according to Hoffman, like many arts-workers I need to reduce my flights and eating/drinking out. Unfortunately, I flew from Adelaide to Melbourne and back for Going Nowhere).

Most delightful was my conversation with Stephen Mushin, artist and industrial designer, who is developing an illustrated book and exhibition—Now If What Then—of wildly satirical yet seemingly feasible designs for radical solutions to climate change, such as the Ethical Polar Bear Burger and Hoodie Factory Farm: Sustainable Post-Arctic Polar Bears. Clever, whimsical, affirming, The Everyday Imaginarium was one of the highlights of the highlights of the Going Nowhere festival weekend for me.”

Emma Webb, Real Time Magazine 2014