It’s with great pleasure that the micro-trustees of AF Sydney can announce our April Recipient! After a very long and intense discussion, we’ve decided to award this months grant to ‘Communion’ – a project by Julia Burns. You can see some of Julia’s work in her video showreel below. From Julia’s submission: The work will be titled ‘Communion’ and is being made for submission to the 2011 Blake Religious Prize. It will feature a short video of two male Aboriginal dancers performing an intimate ballet sequence at the altar of a Catholic church. Filmed at the site of the first Catholic Church in Wollombi and one of the earliest sites of Christian worship in Eastern Australia, this work presents an unconventional scene featuring Aboriginal spirituality and male intimacy within a traditional Christian context. It refers to the adaptability of believers to find spirituality in religions that may not have originally been their own and asks the viewer to question their own ability to adapt to a scene foreign to their expectations. There are obviously some very subjective and sensitive issues around the work that Julia is going to create – in fact, the submission stimulated quite the discussion around our board… read more →

It’s with great pleasure that we can announce that the first recipient of the Awesome Foundation Sydney grant is the team from Big Fag Press, who submitted an awesome application to us in March. The guys at BFP have at their disposal a huge printing press, which they are going to use to create a unique map of the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo. Here is an extract from their application, to give you some idea of what it’s all about. Woolloomooloo is awesome. It contains some of the wealthiest bankers, swankiest restaurants, and pristine apartments in Sydney; it also contains a huge population of homeless folks, plenty of public housing, and loads of social services and cultural institutions. Its current urban form was made possible through union Green Bans in the 1970s. For the first time ever, our map will put all this conflicted data on a two dimensional inky collision course. To create the map, the team will print up a ‘first version’ of the suburb map and then walk around the area. They will mark on the map, by hand, anything ‘weird and wonderful and important that we happen to bump into.’ They will then take this information and… read more →

It’s with awesome pleasure that we can announce the founding board of micro-trustees for the Awesome Foundation Sydney! As you all know, the Awesome Foundation has been spreading it’s seeds across the planet these last 12 months and it’s exciting to see chapters opening up in places like Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, LA and many more! The Awesome Foundation Sydney has been brought together by founding members, Bruno Mattarollo and Steve Hopkins. Like all other chapters, it will provide a $1000 no-strings-attached grant once a month to a project which the board deems suitably awesome. The founding board for AF Sydney is: Bruno Mattarollo: Proud Dad of one amazing boy. Has a love of the web and sustainability. Interests include human rights and social innovation. Steve Hopkins: @trampolineday founder and coffee drinker. Working with an ecosystems approach to make good stuff happen. Jess Nichols: Cocktail-obsessed social media tragic who works on the web at @deloitteonline (part of @green_dot). James Martin: Generalising technologist and asker of questions. Greg Turner: Interaction designer and djangohead. Greg is an interaction designer and computer scientist who specialises in emerging forms of interaction, online and otherwise. Alan Rogers: Thingmaker. Suzie Graham: India, Vedic philosophy, Reiki II, Philanthropy, Indigenous… read more →