FUSE Fund 2023 Provides $50,000 for Darebin Arts Projects
Darebin City Council is proud to announce the recipients of the FUSE Fund 2023 arts grants program.
FUSE Fund supports local artists and organisations to present high-quality arts projects and events as part of FUSE, Darebin’s bi-annual multi-arts festival.
Six diverse projects were successful and received funding totaling $50,000, providing work to around seventeen local artists and arts professionals.
Council received thirty high quality applications for funding.
The six grant recipients will have their work showcased at FUSE's Autumn 2023 and Spring 2023 programs.
Read more about the projects below.
FUSE Fund 2023 Grant Recipients
Jens Altheimer (Preston): Thingamabobs
Thingamabobs is multi-disciplinary arts project, integrating Darebin people in a part of its creation. It culminates in a public exhibition of quirky inventions and contraptions. During an entertaining and guided theatrical tour, audiences are encouraged to interact with the contraptions, activate them and witness their secluded imaginary stories. Four workshops prior to the exhibition are part of the project.
Rosie Jones (Northcote): Hothouse: The Wild Conductors
Hothouse is a hands-on interactive greenhouse where the plants make music. Housed inside a geodesic dome, our playable jungle responds to touch with bursts of music and light. Featuring sounds from local Darebin musicians, this walk-through installation invites playful experimentation for all ages.
Colin Offord (Northcote) Time Distance Music: Music for the 21st Century – Tradition and innovation across time and space.
Time Distance Music is a project four years in the making. Musician and instrument inventor, Colin Offord, leads a group of internationally acclaimed musicians in two five-hour concerts of uplifting, cross-cultural, musical performance.
Marc Pascal (Reservoir): Hold, Pause, Let Go!
The Northcote Town Hall Civic Square will be bathed in a spectacle of gently moving abstract laser light, projected onto the grounds and walls of the Theatre. Rich colours will morph and swirl in ever changing shapes of light, activating the space at night and inviting the curiosity of onlookers.
Delia Poon (Reservoir): Exquisite Bias
Exquisite Bias is an exhibition of collaborative, audio-visual portraits exploring unconscious racial bias and cultural identity in contemporary Australia. It takes the form of a free, public photography shoot and two-week exhibition in a Darebin library. Local residents are invited to register to have their portrait taken by professional photographer/collaborator, Pia Johnson. This participatory arts activation simultaneously captures recorded audio interviews with each participant by sound artist Delia Poon.
The resulting collaborative portraits of diverse Darebin residents are exhibited within the same library for the remainder of the festival. However, like the collective drawing game ‘Exquisite Corpse,’ the audio doesn’t match the visual. Images and biographies are mixed up, creating new combinations of lived experience and visual identity. The project playfully challenges audiences to question their assumptions of Australian identity and what this looks like.
Nicole Robertson (Reservoir): Reservoir Little Art Gallery
When everyone is allowed to participate, what does an art gallery look like? Reservoir Little Art Gallery is a bookshelf-sized, public art gallery in Reservoir where locals can take an artwork home or show their work for free. The art gallery will be supplemented by seventeen purchased artworks. One new artwork will be added daily and publicised alongside its maker on social media. The project aims to provide infrastructure for people living in Reservoir to access artwork and share their own.
