In August 2023 Museo Spazio Pubblico hosted Fiona Hillary from Melbourne (Australia) as Visiting Scholar for a one-week residency. Fiona has been the first artist to support the establishment of our Museum during her first visit in Bologna in 2019, on the occasion of the international workshop “Creative Bologna. Public Art in the Making” promoted by City Space Architecture.
During her stay, Fiona presented ‘Reverberating Futures‘ that she created at Melbourne’s biggest sewage treatment plant, the Western Treatment Plant. Through this fieldwork on the fringes of industrial and post-industrial sites, Fiona creates an understanding of our entanglements in the world.
Her creative projects draw attention to the assemblages of public space, particularly where utility is at the intersection of human, non-human and more-than-human life.
Fiona Hillary is a Melbourne based artist working in the public realm. Her passion lies in site specific practices and the human/non-human relationships that reveal themselves across time. Exploring scale through publicly shared moments of awe and wonder; working with site, neon, sound, human and non-human companion species, her work focuses on temporary, fleeting encounters in and of the everyday. Most recently Fiona’s research understands climate change through her reading of bioluminescent dinoflagellates as the ‘shimmer of the biosphere’.
Fiona has made and curated permanent, temporary, collaborative, performative works for a range of commissioning organizations. Fiona is the Program Manager of the Master of Arts – Art in Public Space and Director of the School of Art research group Contemporary Art and Social Transformation at RMIT University in Australia.
Fiona led a session of the international workshop Suburban Spark on 1 September 2023 on “Public Space Creative Practices” that took place at The Garden, the outdoor space of Museo Spazio Pubblico, and gave a lecture at the 1-day seminar that took place at Dumbo on 4 September, organized in collaboration with Fondazione Innovazione Urbana.
