Where: Level G, Theatrette

In her delicately wrought essays and hand-drawn maps, Vanessa Berry describes her encounters with unusual, forgotten or abandoned places in the city in which she was born and raised, using their details to open up repositories of significance, and to create an alternative city, a Mirror Sydney, illuminated by memory and imagination. She writes at a time when Sydney is being disassembled and rebuilt at an alarming rate. Her determined observation of the over-looked and the odd, the hidden and the enigmatic – precisely those details whose existence is most threatened by development – is an act of preservation in its own right, a testament to what she calls ‘the radical potential of taking notice’.

Vanessa Berry is a Sydney-based writer, artist and zine-maker. Her atlas of Sydney, Mirror Sydney, released October 2017, combines essays and hand-drawn maps to present a portrait of the city's unusual spaces, enigmatic traces and hidden stories. She is also the author of the illustrated memoirs Ninety9 and Strawberry Hills Forever. She is one of Australia's best known zine makers and her zines have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Gallery of Australia. Her hand-drawn maps have been exhibited at the Museum of Sydney, Penrith Regional Gallery and Macquarie University Art Gallery.