Julian Conte

By sourcing an assortment of scaffolding, material panels, ballasts and other construction materials, I have picked out three distinct locations throughout St Kilda with many more that can follow. The first is the Mirka Lane alleyway, a secluded, intimate and favoured spot for Street Artists, creating a starting point for this moving caravan of ephemeral architecture. Many forms of Street Art can come from these locations, from late night rapid sprays, to programmed and educational classes that involve the community with the alternative and free expressing community of St Kilda.

The second location for this moving caravan is the famous Palais Theatre along the Esplanade of St Kilda, a staple of the suburb's former glory as a vibrant and alternative night-life cycle. Unlike the alleyway, this space opens Street Art to a grand scale, exhibiting colours and lashes of shapes and expressions onto a beacon across the foreshore. Despite the tendency to cover up Street Art on a regular basis, what this project provides to the repressed artists and communities of St Kilda is offer a temporal space to be subversive and rebellious to vertical architecture of this suburb.

The final stage of the opening to this project revolves around the historical Halcyon Manor in the suburbs of St Kilda. Once a long-standing devotion to the suburb's golden era, now an over-looked landmark, yearning for a fresh start and a connection into the modern world. Street Art for this location does the most in my opinion as it connects the old realms of St Kilda with the new and offers a window for communities to revisit old memories and identities.

Throughout the entirety of St Kilda, there are an endless number of locations that this architectural temporal caravan can move too.
In a similar manner to a moving caravan or circus, the project is established overnight during the quietest hours, and in the morning, approached by the public, unaware of its existence and intention. On the first day, the space exists on its own, no additions or extras, just a communal space to explore.
But on the first night, when its gets quiet again, the street artists come out and make their mark on the space, splashing colours and meaning onto the walls and equipment as they please.

And then, on the second morning, the public see the changes to the space, the manner of which the street artists have expressed and talked on the walls. As they walk through the jungle of metal pipes, the pathways of wooden panels and construction equipment, observing the contrast and subversion between the Street Art, the construction and the space it builds on, they rebuild a relationship between themselves and the suburb.
Once the scaffolding disappears, and the project comes down, all that remains is the Street Art, waiting to inspire, to revitalise and restore the old vibrant mannerisms and personas of St Kilda's long-standing communities.

As a final test for Street Revolution, I assembled a set of modular scaffolding with plywood hoarding panels attached on all sides. These panels have undergone a communal workshop of spray painting and graffitiing to simulate the activities and programs on each of the three sites. This draft prototype demonstrates a person's ability, artist or not, to transform the tools of development and gentrification into a canvas of subversion and grit. With many of these placed across a single site, slowly enveloping the walls and roads with splashes of colour and vibrancy, the people of St Kilda take back a corner of their suburb, using this rebellious call to connect to their old identities, even if only for a short while.