Geelong Design Week 2024 Broadsheet ︎︎︎ ‘Who Cares?’ 

‘Who Cares’ considers Djilang/Geelong’s UNESCO Creative Cities designation in light of iLiana Fokianaki’s (Bureau of Care, 2020-ongoing) call for the re-recognition of care as a collective imperative for Djilang/Geelong Design week 2024.

A1 double sided poster + essay by Ranch Pressing printed in Djilang/Geelong by Geelong Reprographics. 

594 x 891 mm

Edition of 50 (Sold out)

November 2024 


 

The Foreword to the United Nations’ The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023 is a sobering read. The report reveals: “Progress on more than 50 per cent of targets of the SDGs is weak and insufficient; on 30 per cent, it has stalled or gone into reverse.”ⁱ The COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war in Gaza and the ongoing conflict in Sudan have forcibly displaced 110 million people, and an end to world hunger and poverty is nowhere in sight. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and global solidarity continues to weaken. The Report does not mince words and, while it insists that “governments remain united behind the 2030 Agenda,” it states that above all else we need peace. As audiences, organisers and designers, global events loom large in the periphery of our thoughts as we recognise our ecological, social and economic connections to events that can seem so geographically removed from our working lives. As we grapple with our own opinions, experiences and personal responsibilities in our daily practices, we do not forget that, by design, we are all global citizens. Necessarily, it is the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that directly informs Djilang/Geelong’s sustainability goals at a local council level and Geelong Design Week 2024’s guest curator Tonya Meyrick is “adopting ‘design for humanity’ as the overarching premise” for the event.ⁱⁱ

For those unfamiliar with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there are 17 of them and they were developed 9 years ago as a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.”ⁱⁱⁱ The goals are the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and are used by international, federal, state and local governing bodies, NGOs, and sustainably minded corporations to set their own local agendas for sustainable development. The SDGs are foundational to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network of which Djilang/Geelong, since 2017, has been a City of Design. Having been part of the application committee for the UNESCO bid in 2017 and having been President of the International Council of Design 5 years prior, Dr Russell Kennedy reiterates that our design designation is a continuing commitment to recognise our strengths, hold ourselves to account, champion, invest and lead in the field.

Thank you to Dowel Jones’s Dale Hardiman; The Wool Museum’s Josephine Rout; Geelong Gallery’s Lisa Sullivan; Circle of Thread’s Emily Rastas, Kate Sylvester and Lazarus Gordon; Julie Pham, Platform Arts’s Ilana Russell; Kiri Tawhai; Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation; and Ranch Pressing’s Colin Maier.

© Ranch Pressing and the artists, 2024. This project is supported by a City of Greater Geelong Community Grant.









Djilang/Geelong’s successful 2017 UNESCO Creative Cities bid relied on thousands of generations of Wadawurrung design knowledge, and on “a modern industrial history of making textiles, chemicals and automotive and machinery components.”^ivToday, Goal 11: “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” is the City of Greater Geelong’s priority and the focus of Geelong Design Week 2024. Looking towards 2030 with the responsibility of our designation, our contribution to a global future remains ours as a city to shape. As I sit in the studio of my newly formed sustainable micro-press Ranch Pressing, I wonder, what does it look like to be one practitioner, in one city in the Southern Hemisphere, working towards a set of global goals? How can Geelong Design Week project the reverberations of creative action at the local scale to make meaning on the world stage? Who sees, who hears, and most importantly, who cares?

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Notes

i United Nations (2023) The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2023/ accessed 1.11.2024

ii Geelong Design Week website: https://www.geelongdesignweek.com.au/about accessed 14.11.2024

iii United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Sustainable Development (2015) Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda accessed 1.11.2024

iv UNESCO Creative Cities Network website:https://www.unesco.org/en/creative-cities/geelong accessed 1.11.2024