De-marcating space for the pursuit of (…) is a contemporary toolkit for invoking a temporary or momentary experience of “Magic” in urban parks and public space. With the design of space discouraging stillness (loitering) and creating barriers to the natural world, this toolkit signals to experiential possibilities through designating space for stillness, awareness and pause.

The project is framed by feminist philosophies which acknowledge the benefits to foregrounding “other ways of knowing”; non-intellectual, experiential or embodied knowledge, which is often backgrounded and undervalued from Western patriarchal viewpoints. With this understanding, pointing to and engaging with experiential possibilities can be seen as a feminist research methodology into understanding

ourselves in relation to our immediate environment and urban existence.

Marisa is an inter-disciplinary artist, critical writer, and student of embodied movement, interested in our relationship to ‘nature’; in the context of wider feminist discourses and our urban existence.

Through her practice, she explores everyday expressions of the spiritual, the digital, the contrived and the ironic that can manifest while interacting with a houseplant, a backyard, or public space in the concrete city. Sometimes her work points out the sinister undercurrents of our contrived environment, and sometimes it imagines new ways to re-connect. Her practice works to promote experiences that are intimate, gentle, self-aware and center knowledge outside of the Western canon such as embodied or experiential knowledge.

Marisa completed her Bachelor of Fine Art (Hons) in 2015. In 2016 she presented this research for LEVEL ARI and Critical Animals Creative Research Symposium. In 2017, she exhibited solo at MOANA Project Space, Perth, and KINGS Artist-Run, Melbourne.

Marisa lives and works on unceded Jagara and Turrbal land.