DISRUPT: Mapping the future of Melbourne through stories

BACKGROUND: This work of exhibition contributes to belonging (Baumeister & Leary) & community storytelling (Rappaport, Sonn et al). ‘Creative writing thinking’ is a methodology proposed by the research team in previous works that supposes creative writing produces knowledges, which might then be ‘applied creative writing’ in response to challenges and opportunities of community belonging & social enterprise (Rendle-Short F et al. 2017). How do we story the city? What might a future city look like? What does a map of a city look like when it’s informed by creative writing thinking? CONTRIBUTION: DISRUPT is an exhibition on a 20m wall in the CBD during MKW, the outcome of 4 workshops using creative writing thinking to discover how a city is ‘storied’, expressed as a map produced by RMIT creative writing researchers, the public & artist Alex Hotchin. The creative writing workshop and the map are here considered as forms for taking creative writing thinking & expressing it collaboratively, in response to the problem of storying the city, because the city itself is shared, both experienced & made together. DISRUPT shows how storying the city can manifest through methodologies of creative encounter & exchange, collective embodied experience of participants, visible storytelling & public mapping. The research develops a form to encompass collaborative effort & creative writing knowledge which contribute to an impression of the future city. SIGNIFICANCE: DISRUPT shifted knowledge on how to come at creative writing knowledge collaboratively; apply creative writing thinking to social change; express creative writing knowledge through spatial forms; & to better define the space of collaboration & co-creation as articulated by other creative writing research projects such as WrICE. Attendance to MKW: 30000; the festival’s estimated economic impact on CoM was $700000. MKW contributed $3000 competitive funding to this project which was also resourced by Metro Tunnels & STREAT.