Voices in the Streets - Mother Tongue Poetry
Role: Producer, Lead Artist, Facilitator, Writer, Designer
Voices in the Streets was a city-wide poetry activation that reimagined where and how women’s voices could be encountered.
This poetry activation, funded by a Banyule Arts and Culture Project Grant was split into two streams, Amplify and Equip.
Amplify seeked to platform the voices of marginalised women in innovative and uniques ways. The primary way of doing this was via a Poetry Treasure Hunt throughout the streets of Banyule, activating public spaces whilst also amplifying women’s voices. 15 poems by women writers were spread throughout Banyule and beyond in parks, cafes, and shop front windows. Members of the public would access a map and hunt them out. By the end of the project the map had received over 3000 views.
Equip was formed through 5 public writing workshops ran by diverse women writers. These sessions were sell out events and engaged local community as well as long standing members of the Mother Tongue Poetry networks.
The whole project was backed up by a truly unique marketing angle of putting poems onto coffee cups and distributing them to 6 different cafes in the local area. These cafes became locations on the hunt and the cups themselves featured a QR code to the workshop and map as well as one of 5 different poems written by a local woman.
The project centred accessibility and gentle community engagement ,offering art that could be both stumbled upon or sought out, while amplifying marginalised voices within the local landscape.
Voices in the Street was conceived by Fleassy Malay (CEO& Founder, Mother Tongue Poetry) who, with support from Katie Lohner (Co-Chair and Opps manager, Mother Tongue Poetry) received funding from Banyule Arts and Culture and Bendigo Community Bank East Ivanhoe to make the project happen.
