WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Punk Human

Art Exhibition 2025

A JOURNEY INTO THE UNDERBELLY OF SYDNEY

Over the course of one year, I have documented Sydney’s deepening accommodation crisis. This has involved visiting numerous homeless encampments around Sydney. Where I often discussed the causes of homelessness with those living on the streets. Causes identified included fleeing from domestic violence, having little to no money following eviction, experiencing a sudden crisis or misfortune, being without family or friends who could temporarily accommodate, likely mental illness, and no access to useful and appropriate social services. To complement this social inquiry, I have also assembled an Empty Properties Register to starkly illustrate, through onsite photography, the utter mismanagement of local accommodation resources. The Empty Properties Register demonstrates precisely that many existing Sydney properties sit vacant, unoccupied, and empty. And that, these same abandoned properties are scattered throughout many Sydney suburbs, indicating widespread resource waste. I argue, through this World Turned Upside Down digital art exhibition and elsewhere, that many of these idle properties could be utilised right now to accommodate the homeless. The alternative is to simply let these vacant properties rot whilst people live under the stars. Which is where find ourselves today.

BUYING AND SELLING AND PROFITING

When houses and apartments are left empty and remain unoccupied for years at a stretch and are in no way utilised as a home for anyone at all and now a wire mesh fence and numerous plywood boards obstruct useful access to the property whilst dilapidation and ruin visibly encroaches upon many such structures and people have no choice but to park themselves somewhere in the streets and under the bridges and around the perimeter of railway stations and in any architectural crevice they can crawl into with their possessions in bags of all types and sizes and with tired eyes looking out upon a mean-spirited world then it is fair to say those same houses and apartments are not for living in but are for buying and selling and profiting.