60. Mirror Sydney

Dallas chats with Vanessa about her delicately wrought essays and hand-drawn maps, Vanessa describes her encounters with unusual, forgotten or abandoned places in the city in which she was born and raised, using their details to open up repositories of significance, and to create an alternative city, a Mirror Sydney, illuminated by memory and imagination. She writes at a time when Sydney is being disassembled and rebuilt at an alarming rate. Her determined observation of the over-looked and the odd, the hidden and the enigmatic – precisely those details whose existence is most threatened by development – is an act of preservation in its own right, a testament to what she calls ‘the radical potential of taking notice’. Vanessa’s work combines a low-fi DIY approach with an awareness of the tradition of philosophical urban investigation. Her unique style of map illustration was developed through the making of zines and artworks, collaging detailed line drawings with text from typewriters and Letraset. We round out our conversation with a drip into Vanessa’s latest book, Gentle and Fierce. Having spent her life in city environments, Vanessa’s experiences with animals have largely been through encounters in urban settings, representations in art and the media, and as decorative ornaments or kitsch. Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life. Author Dr Vanessa Berry is a Sydney writer and artist who works with history, memory and archives. She is the author of the memoir Ninety9, the ‘autobiographical almanac’ Strawberry Hills Forever and Mirror Sydney, an essayistic atlas exploring the city’s marginal places and undercurrents, and which won the 2018 Mascara Review’s Avant-garde Award for nonfiction. Vanessa’s latest book is Gentle and Fierce. Host Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney Interviewed by Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.