George Goodnow and Simona Castricum

What signs, pins and flags do you use to find safe spaces?

Road and safety signs are ubiquitous features of urban environments, which give us directions and shape our movements, responsibilities and spatial boundaries. Yet, they are also hostile agents of normativity—docility, control, and surveillance acting under the guise of safety; binary frameworks that often force gender-diverse bodies to bend, conform or be excluded.

‘WAYFINDING’ references local signage and wayfinding design to speak to concepts of safety, visibility and possibility from queer and trans perspectives. The project considers relationships to built environments and explores the potential for everyday infrastructure to hold queer archives and narratives. Words of affirmation for transformation and autonomy are forefront:

It took a radical dream to find your way here; radical belief makes queer futurity possible.

George Goodnow (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). Their practice ranges from painting and public murals, to sculpture and site-specific installations. By fabricating fictional architectures and objects, or adjusting existing architectures, George considers how spaces reflect, orientate and hold bodies. Their work focuses on relationships to urban built environments to explore ideas of gender, binaries and queer methodologies.

Simona Castricum (she/her) is a multidisciplinary creative and academic working in music and architecture on Wurundjeri land of Kulin Nation. Simona is a Research Fellow in Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. Simona’s speculative practice explores queer and trans futures and fictions through music and architecture. Simona’s work re-imagines radical relationships between the tactile, virtual, and effective conditions of gender and sexual nonconformity.