Written on the white lines of a Melbourne bike path, this 10-kilometre long poem wants to connect two different parts of the city: hipster Brunswick and the North, a hub for migration old and new.
From Brunswick to Fawkner Cemetery in Melbourne's suburban north, the poem The Narrow Road to the Deep North took more than one month to complete. It stands as an idealistic bridge between two very different sides of Melbourne, divided socially, economically and quite literally by the commuting artery of Bell Street.
The poem is written on the white lines in the middle of the bike path running through the municipality of Moreland.
Born from an idea had by photographer Tania Jovanovic, the 10-kilometre-long poem was realised by artists Malcolm Angelucci and Majella Thomas, both part of the Illimine Collective, which is comprised of artists based in Melbourne, Sydney and Rome, Italy.
The poem was written as part of the MoreArt Public Art Show, which annually explores the transport corridors of the Moreland City Council area.
"This is because the communities on the two sides of the artery are quite different," said Malcolm Angelucci, who is also lecturer of Italian Studies at The University of Melbourne.
"The South is much more 'artsy', so to speak, while the North is characterised by migration, both old and new. There is a post-war migrants community from various nationalities and more recently-arrived migrant communities that are still in the process of fully engaging with the overall society and becoming part of our cultural milieu."
"We decided to take the white line at the centre of the the Upfield Bike Path - a shared-use path for cyclists and pedestrians which crosses that border between the two cities [Bell Street] - trying to put ourselves in the situation spending a lot of time on this path, on our knees. And learning about it, experiencing it, talking about it with other people."
The artists were inspired by 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi (often translated as the Narrow Road to the Deep North) both for the title of their opera and for the collaborative nature of the haikai no renga poems, made of short verses added by various authors, said Angelucci.
Angelucci was born in Italy but is a local resident, living in the Brunswick area with his partner and poem's co-author Majella Thomas. Verses of the poem were also "donated by residents and people that the artists met "on the road".
"We wanted to use writing to better understand the landscape surrounding us on our slow journey up north, turning one day's experience into the following day's verses."
So what did Malcolm learn about those two different sides of Melbourne and their people?
"When you are on your knees, writing on the ground for a long time, you end up taking a new perspective of what surrounds you and the people you meet."
In his conversations with commuters or residents, Angelucci was struck by the normalisation of certain ideas and that topics of conversation were not affected by preconceived ideas of identity, such as one's country of birth or language spoken.
"The answers you receive always depend on the question you ask. If you go to a person in Coburg and ask them, 'Who are you? Where are you from? What is your nationality?,' obviously answers are linked to the question and we start believing that an Italian is just an Italian, a Greek is a Greek and a Lebanese is a Lebanese, and that they possess certain fundamental characteristics, sometimes dangerous, other times exotic.
"But when you are sitting on the road talking about running shoes or the weather or, as it happened to us every day with three ladies, about how to lose some weight...in those moments you are not interested in those questions [of identity] but only in talking."
According to Angelucci, people are much more complex and yet simpler to connect with than the categories we might be tempted to apply to them.
