Public Art / Urban Realm Commission, City of Port Phillip 2022

‘To drift – to move with the waves. Drifters waive their individual sovereignty, suspend the priority of ever reaching a destination’ - Marielle Pelissero, Performance Theorist 

 ‘Derive (translates to Drift)– ‘a certain kind of practice...its whole field of meaning is aquatic, conjuring up flows, channels, eddies, currents, and also drifting, sailing or tacking against the wind. It suggests a space and time of liquid movement, sometimes predictable but sometimes  turbulent.’ - McKenzie Wark, Critical Theorist 

‘Human populations in the all-too-near future will do their best to re-build coastal cities on higher ground, in a kind of rolling inland migration of the urban fabric’ - Jan Zalasiewicz, Chair, Anthropocene Working Group 

Drift was commissioned through City of Port Phillip's ‘Reimagine Design Activation, 2022’ and supported by RMIT. The work has been installed along the Bay Trail since June 2022. The project title is a reference to both the ‘drifting’ edge of the bay due to rising waters and to the French avant-garde art and design movement The Letterists whose 1955 ‘Theory of the derive’ (Drift) encouraged ‘playful-constructive’ behaviour as a critical mode of socialising the city. The use of inflated buoys as urban furniture borrows from the marine vernacular of Port Phillip. Buoys are connected into ‘threads’, by passing marine rope through the eyelets. The ‘threads’ perform two important roles: literally connecting individual seating into social assemblages and creating enough physical mass that the arrangements can be 'moored’ to existing posts.