Open For Maintenance

Open for Maintenance is concerned with the privatization of Melbourne’s public buildings. Increasingly unchecked in recent years, the spaces we may think of as public are maintained behind the scenes by private actors, resulting in spaces that act in the interests of their benefactors before the public.

As the city has emptied out due to the pandemic, the frailties of this situation have been exposed, leaving these spaces functioning neither for commercial interest nor the public. So what public remains?

Enter the Department of Maintenance, a new government department to take over the contracts held with private maintenance companies and centralise the care of the city and it’s public. The DOM enacts an occupation of Melbourne’s GPO, and through a series of interventions returns the building to a public workforce.

These interventions are acts of maintenance on the GPO itself, appropriating a language of service spaces and leveraging past and present architectures of Melbourne’s initiatives towards its public to serve a new understanding of the importance of maintenance for the city.

By occupying the GPO a question is asked of how we currently use our public buildings and what their use is saying about what we value.