elsewhereonline.com.au

The Piazza Project is a collaborative project between the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University, The History Program, University of Western Australia,  and Australians Studying Abroad.

The project aims to explore the ways people around the world have used public spaces through time and the multitude of meanings they have given them. We have chosen the piazza - it has many names in different languages, but this seems quintessential - because it is an enclosed, urban congregational space (rather than say, a corridor) in which people of different cultures express communal identity. It interests us as a type of space where social rituals and interactions take place and where power is expressed. We are inquisitive about the diverse meanings different cities, states, social classes, religions, hegemonies, etc, have given such spaces. We are concerned with personal meanings of these spaces and their role as nodes of intersection between public and private domains. As historians, we want to explore the biographies of piazzas, as a way of documenting the relationship between many pasts and the present. As students of visual culture, we shall investigate how such spaces emerge and evolve; how they are designed, modified and decorated, and how their diverse social, economic, political and religious roles are expressed visually.

The Piazza Project is designed as an internet networking project so that scholars, writers, artists, musicians, film makers, etc. from around the world can contribute to a global discourse on this fundamental cultural space. We hope to promote and document scholarly research as well as creative projects, and to explore the relationship between the two. The Piazza Project is therefore a 'virtual space' in which the multiple meanings of physical space - and the connections between these meanings - can be explored.