Mapping from Australia to Greece with the Heart Maps project, by Amy Tsilemanis

With friends old and new

We make our new keys

To the maps that we see

And the maps that we breathe

From Good People Dreaming, Amy Tsilemanis

Heart Maps was a creative residency project that took place in Victoria, Australia. It explored maps, both physical and emotional, through processes including walking, archival research, oral history collection and creative audio storytelling. My work as a researcher and artist draws on writing, imagery, audio, performance, poetry, wandering, essentially any explorations that allow connections between people, places and ideas.

Established as part of a Creative Fellowship funded by Regional Arts Australia the project began through conversations with people about the ways we could together explore the many layers of history and stories held within the Otways area on Gadubanud Country. These conversations bloomed under a tree in Johanna, a small community surrounded by forest, farms and with views of the ocean; about one hour to the inland city of Colac, and forty minutes to the coastal town of Apollo Bay, a popular tourist destination.

The project was a collaboration with many partners: Richard Collopy was cultural advisor, a Gadubanud traditional custodian, artist and educator with many deep years of working in the region and its rich history spanning tens of thousands of years; a passionate group of volunteers from the Apollo Bay Museum and Historical Society who hold the stories and artefacts of the town’s 19^th and 20^th century history and its links to developments in communication technology within the site of the cable station that first connected Tasmania to mainland Australia; Jade Forest, a photographer and leader in the local arts community; and Aimee Chapman, an electronic musician and audio producer. Crossing timeframes, disciplines, and approaches, we came together through a love of the area and its storytelling possibilities as well as a shared commitment to caretaking, nurturing and story-keeping. As a relative outsider in the area, I wanted to start by listening. In contrast to the concept of a ‘town crier,’ I set myself up in the project as a kind of ‘town-listener.’

Living in Australia, being ‘Australian,’ can be a fraught thing. I am from here, but not from here. Australia is a country of immigrants, and is also home to the world’s oldest living culture, the First Australians. It is a home made up of numerous Countries and First Nations peoples who have their own complex networks of language, land management, law and lore, culture and knowledge. Songlines, or Dreaming tracks, are passed down through generations and capture the depth of these networks across millennia, albeit sometimes fragmented through the brutal impacts of colonisation. Living in this place, Australia, means reckoning with its darkness–both past and present–as well as listening to and honouring First Nations’ culture and the knowledge that offers. 

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Maps as navigation and storytelling tools in all their various two and three dimensional forms inspired this project.Through workshops, people were invited to visually map their connections to the local area as well as record their stories orally. I then wove these into audio walks which were shared with the community at the annual Apollo Bay arts festival WinterWild. As part of this layering of personal and communal maps – and of connections through time and across artforms and experiences of place – during the festival people were invited to write postcards and put them into Heart Maps post boxes. These became part of an overlaid communal heart map of the area, a mix of the visual, aural, textual, and embodied, and of past, present and future.

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WinterWild featured a free Heart Maps Story Trail that people could dip in and out of as part of their festival experience (listen at link below). Richard Collopy and I also created an audio walk, Heart Maps, Down the Line: An Ambulatory Audio Adventure. This took the form of an imagined radio show: a two-hour moving feast of creative oral history weaving voices, music and soundscape, which guided audiences around the town and between different kinds of spaces. This guided perambulation created new connections to place and time in relation to the relatively short colonial history of the region and the expanse of First Nations time and culture. The audio walk journeyed down streets, to the beach, and into the museum. One participant reflected, 

“I found the overlay of timeframes quite profound, the very tangible and temporal but relatable local anecdotes, contrasting with the long term, almost infinite indigenous experience of connection to the town we know as Apollo Bay. As an occasional local, it definitely increased my love and knowledge of this place!”

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Although Heart Maps was a particular project based in a place in Australia, travel to Northern Greece in July revealed that the concept might resonate more broadly as an approach that is about making connections with big open hearts, and collectively sharing the grief, joy and all that’s in between. Creative processes that facilitate exploration of places of unknowing becoming places of connection, both physical and emotional, can be a valuable tool in forming a deeper understanding of a place in any part of the world.

When I shared the Heart Maps project at the Walking Visions conference/artist gathering in Prespa, Greece, I also began to recognise parallels between the two countries, in the wounds and grief that linger amidst the beauty. I heard recurring words like scarred, unacknowledged grief and burdened. There was a sense of the landscape holding the weight of past violence, the pain of the human and non-human, and the emptied space – whether by conflict, dispossession, economic or environmental imperative. These resonant scars echo those of Australia and the way they hang over the present. The songlines of Australia’s First Nations Peoples, even when broken or damaged, are an enduring example of connecting ancient routes/roots, and perhaps of healing order. They expand the possibilities of creating new ways of moving and walking together. Similarly, a key theme of the conference seemed to be how the intersection of disciplines – art, science, history, geography and more – might re-weave these wounds and bridge these borders. 

Heart Maps seeks to contribute to a conversation about the ways in which deep collaborative creative mapping/storytelling projects can help us find a way forward together, acknowledging the traumas of the past and the possibilities of the future.  

A Poem for Prespa

Might we walk and sing the places’ songs,
Be they broken and tired, wounded and wronged
Be they minute and mighty
Fractured by fighting
Yet by white birds alighting
In rivers aligning
And good people de-crying
The hurts that were done
 
Might we walk and sing the people’s songs,
Our music be it stilted, unstilled
Rising gently like water reflecting the sun
Helios above
And caves full of story
And yellow flowers that hum
 
As our songs interweave may our spirits be strong
For the song of the air, the land, and the water
Become one with us
When we all sing along

Project Links

Good People Dreaming  (poem created during Heart Maps workshops on the Otways and read at the conference in Greece)

A little audio taster as the project was brewing

Heart Maps Story Trail Audio

Richard Collopy speaking to the conference in Greece

Creative collaboration following Vassiliki Sofra’s walk/boat shop ‘In the heavens above as in the waters,’ in Prespa Greece