FROM SITUATION TO SITE- how we managed to convince EPRA to let three crazy art students into their buliding.

So before we start documenting our 'Site fiction' project in the bookshop I thought I'd write some brief installments of how we actually got use of the space and the all that entailed. As much as I got sick of hearing the phrase "Welcome to bureacracy" like we'd just enetred some strange and foreign land it was kinda true and had moments of satisfaction and frustration!

Installment 1: Anna and Laura's 'derrive'

So the idea for this whole project came from mine and Laura's 'derrive' (I think that's what it's called) of the Northbridge as part of Emma's 'mis- guided tour' of the city on Monday the 11th August. We decided to walk down William street and write down the address of all the disused buildings and see what information we could gather. We had seen many before and made many a passing comment about how perfect these spaces we came across were for studio/installation/art making in general and what a pity it was that so many were just sitting empty crying out to be activated and invigorated by art students such as ourselves. So we decided instead of whinging about it we would see how far we could get.

The Arcane Bookshop was the first property we came across (after walking the huge distance of one block) and we found out from the friendly WAMI people who inhabit the upper level that it was owned by EPRA (East Perth Redevlopment Authority)- a good start, we had names (and numbers). We continued up William street and there was basically an empty space on every block, sometimes two and we realised the difficulty was not finding disused spaces, but deciding which one we we wanted most!

But it was the Arcane Bookshop(which we thought was 214 but were later told it was actually212 William st.), being the first we came across and quite quaint (and convenietnly close to the city), which had secured a place in our hearts and became the property we decided to pursue. Our journey had begun.

Highlights of our afternoon included-
running into Jo Gould very early on in our walk who we had previously said was someone we should talk to about finding spaces to occupy in the city- it was very serendipitous and derrivesque.
getting to view the guy who owns WA Skydiving's Bachelor Pad- in- progress and finding out that a lot of the upper level properties on William street used to be brothels and each room has four fireplaces and
stopping to eat Icey Ice (Golden Flake of course- Laura needed her corn fix!)

So after a satisfying afternoon trapsing the streets of Northbridge we ate some yummy food at SPARROW (!) and feeling pretty good about ourselves and our gathering of information made plans to call EPRA the following day and see what they had to say- little did we know of that crazy land of bureacracy we were about to enter. Ha!