What could a Melbourne-centric disaster shelter look like?

As part of her multi-year Portage project, Jen Rae and First Nations master weavers Vicki Couzens, Vicki Kinai, Bronwyn Razem and Muhubo Sulieman invite participants to learn the skills of hand-building, knot-tying, binding and grass weaving to come up with imaginative and practical shelter-making solutions in the climate emergency.

Portage is the act of carrying a vessel over land between navigable waters. Each element of Rae’s multi-platform Portage series explores the ways in which communication, community and care are central to the notion of survival.

“Disasters are a terrible time to learn new skills – is the premise of Portage, a multiplatform speculative futures project in four parts, focusing on collaborative co-building, generative knowledge-sharing and social cohesion in the context of climate change related displacement. What are the skills and knowledges at the thresholds of being lost or are often overlooked and undervalued, that we may need in the years ahead? How might we put differences aside to collectively adapt and prepare?” – Jen Rae, 2021.