Marilena Hewitt is a third-generation Italian migrant, non-binary, digital publisher, designer, writer and artist. Hewitt is the brains behind PLATYPUS Publications, an art journal which aims to radically challenge issues such as inequality, discrimination, injustice and advocate for change. Their work explores intersections between climate change, connection to place, and queer communities and experiences. Hewitt, an architecture graduate, found the fire season of 2019 to be the catalyst for change, creating a fundamental shift in practice from development to documentation. They approach publishing as an implicitly political act, using humour, poetry and art; speaking and responding to colonial and capitalist forces as a way to imagine a new kind of reading and living.
Hewitt is trailblazing in the publishing world, winning the 2022 Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. Having also dabbled in filmmaking, teaming up with Brodie Poole on MUD: A Documentary on Brisbane’s Wetlands, Hewitt’s love and commitment to ecological preservation is clear.
In this Colour Box Studio interview, Hewitt discusses the tumultuous nature of creativity, their obsession with diagrams and their upcoming five-book project; PLATYPUS Essentials.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
I firstly would like to acknowledge the Yuggera and Turrbal people. The Traditional owners of the land, seas and skies I enjoy, work and live. I would like to acknowledge my extremely privileged position as a white settler and a third generation Italian migrant and the hard work to be done to understand the role these systems I am born of play in upholding the structures of discrimination and injustice. The work I do does not wish to be included in the existing bankrupt social order. Instead something fuller, vaster, brighter and empathetic.
I am a sensitive, non-binary, small-press and digital publisher, designer, writer and artist devoted to design and community based documentation in Meanjin. Through my work, most relevantly PLATYPUS, I strive to rearrange, to never erase nor develop over. To truly consider something as it is. Just differently. To me publishing is ‘making public’ which isn’t restricted just to printed matter but encompasses many forms. Through my background in architecture, I have come to see publishing as an implicitly political act and take up the challenge of imagining a new kind of reading and/or living. My work seeks to acknowledge the intricacies of poetry, architecture, art, and film and how separately and together they can be incredibly powerful communicators. For me sharing is a luxury not a compromise. I will continue to design and publish more artist books with radical and diverse thinkers to enable new ways of seeing immense issues like mass extinction, inequality, discrimination and injustice, and advocate for change.
How did you start your creative practice and why?
I landed back in Quandamooka country (the bay east and slightly south of Brisbane) after bike riding around Europe, through thick forest, heavy industrial estates and so many smelly pig farms. I spent six months in 2019 missing the deep sounds of the ancient birds and this land I had grown up on. Coming home things were the same but there was, and still is, this intangible difference. The climate crisis felt more emotionally turbulent than ever and I was only scraping the surface of understanding and listening to this complex ecological, cultural and political landscape. I knew when I came back I didn’t want to suffocate it with more shit developments (Brisbane’s favourite thing to do), as an architecture grad, but instead document it with empathy. To rearrange knowledge and power in this country and express concerns with systems of oppression in a different way. Instead of fear, using humour, poetry and art. I think current models of solemn rectitude and ethical-icks don’t seem to move us. Calculations certainly don’t move us. But I think relationships do. What moves us more than our feelings, addictions, desires, loves and debauchery?
The final catalyst for the PLATYPUS Publication was a devastating article I read while the fires were ripping through the land killing all my favourite native animals in 2019. It basically said platypus are rapidly going extinct if we don’t do something about it now. Around the same time, I had created an alias for my writing practice called PLATYPUS because platypus, like us, are fascinating creatures swimming somewhere between land and life – a rare breed of logical parts that make a unique and beautiful whole. And they have this incredible hold over us! I live for the exciting and often spiritual stories I have been told of platypus sightings. So, after reading this article, I went for a run, and things swirled around inside me and PLATYPUS publication was born. Something that started as a passion project to save the platypus has now, five years later, turned into something much bigger than I ever could have imagined because of the radical, loving community it surrounds itself with.
Ps: To this day I have not seen a PLATYPUS and this is not from lack of trying…
PLATYPUS Essentials: 00-01 WATER
Where did you grow up and how has it influenced your practice?
I was born and have spent most of my life on the salty banks of Quandamooka country, in a secret, suburban mudflat called Thorneside. This inlet of sorts sits 20km east of Brisbane and meets the mouth of Lota creek, known as Mooroondu “the nose”. The last book I made SALTY as well as a documentary I made with a friend and filmmaker Brodie Poole MUD, is all about the experiences of growing up bayside. The book was an excuse to explore the sticky nuances of saltyness, to understand the richness of growing up bayside and to celebrate with honesty the most beautiful and stable cultural icons in my life- my parents. I wrote this as part of the SALTY foreword in 2021 and I think it answers the question and expresses the profound impact this place has had on my life and work.
“… Out on the bay, the seas are safe and calm and suburban life is quiet and mundane.
High tide hugs, low tide let go.
Humans don’t know much about what goes on below the big patch of blue, but boy do I know the inescapable feeling of muddy Thorneside. The power of living in one place is not desirable to many, especially the isolated, dirty, smelly, salty and midgy riddled mudflats I grew up on. I have spent 5 years in the city questioning my belonging to place, to people and to my body, but this land of sediment and trees that grow against all odds, will always fill me with hope if not belonging.
The culture swims amongst the brim, dolphins and dugongs and dances in the mangroves at sunset. It is so much more than a nice view with a cool breeze. It’s knowing you get sandies in months ending in BER; it’s waiting patiently for the Christmas North-Easters to go windsurfing with dad; it’s constantly being yelled at by mum to “go play outside”; it’s becoming immune to midgies and shoes while playing too much tennis with your bro; it’s chasing your dog in knee deep mud; it’s waking up before sunrise to feel the great stillness; it’s meeting creatures beyond your imagination and putting them back or sharing them with people you love; it is never taking more than you need.
It is knowing that out there is far better than in here.”
Tell us about your past creative projects. What has been your most treasured creation so far?
I worked with a good friend Brodie Poole (documentary film maker) to make a feature documentary MUD, which was about Meanjin’s surrounding wetlands and its people. The film was heralded as being “intelligently and elegantly naïve” and ignited my love for documenting rather than developing. This was my first legitimate taste of producing/publishing and established my obsession with documenting the Anthropocene with humour and poetry and I have since worked with so many amazing artists and writers to do so. Physical exposure and observations of the overlooked is now the crux of my practice with my self-produced/designed, small-press publication PLATYPUS being my most cherished publishing work to date.
PLATYPUS is what keeps me excited and going as well as tired, broke and overwhelmed. Each creative project I have ever worked on brings new loves and learning curves. I loved documenting my parents, particularly my Mum’s and Nina’s recipes in SALTY and in this new book I had the pleasure of visiting the incredible Mparntwe(Alice Springs) in the central desert. Each book as much as I don’t intend it to be is deeply expressive of what is going on in my life at the time. I treasure the fact that I am privileged enough to have the means to share my own and other’s deeply honest expressions of life and this frankly deranged world we live in.
I also once made this toilet poster called BOM (with feelings) which is a Girlfriend style flow chart about our relationship to the weather and whether we should “break up now”, “sleep on it” or “stick together till the end”. I am obsessed with diagrams, they have an arrogance I will never have and they are incredibly fun to make. When I make diagrams I pretend I am a closeted engineer that loves making boring looking diagrams but if you look closely there is a very cheeky gay subtext.
Tell us about your current project?
PLATYPUS Essentials is the latest project I have been working on. It imaginatively engages with the necessary; being the state of the unavoidable – it is clear what is essential – food, water, shelter, energy, waste – just not how or why to engage more deeply? This new series of art books asks what is the moral imperative of the misunderstood, engineered scapes that facilitate life as we know it and how do we begin to show empathy toward something outside of our worried minds? How do we begin to respect water and food as more-than-a-resources? How do we contemplate shelter for more-than-humans? How do we map lines of power, and how do we more deeply connect to the Bin Man? How do we deepen our relationship to all ecologies, especially those outside the traditional notions of what is “natural”?
Water as a motionless realm is unimaginable- a dead, oppressive waste. Water gives life, but how does water affect life? How does it hold you? It is common, precious, and transmutable. It is the link and the obstacle. It is innate yet it must be contained in order to quench the thirst. Water is beyond a tangible resource. 00-01 WATER is the first of the PLATYPUS Essentials series. There are two sides to this book; [thirsty], a Queer Field Guide, seeking a queer utopia amongst the colonial, watery spaces of Mparntwe (Alice Springs), and [swallow] a platform for wet critical discussion, art and literature from 14 contributors across the continent.
If this intrigues you, please come along to the launch party/exhibition of 00-01 WATER on the 23rd of Feb at Gladstone Road Studios in Highgate Hill next door to Lucky Duck. There will also be readings from incredible poet and artist Lionel Fogarty and poet Nat Briggs.
Who or what inspires your practice?
There is heaps that inspires me on a day to day basis including unexpected interactions, swimming and music, art works and poetry but most obviously at the moment it is being queer, my queer community and queer ecology… The queer and the “nature” are equally threatened by capitalist domestication; they find connection in The field. The field offers a place to suffer and to frolic. To be brave and empathic as well as erratic and angry. It has taken generations of immense suffering and radical and fearless advocacy by our queer ancestors to get us closer to the queer utopia we dream of for all life. I don’t feel comfortable stopping imagining it now. I want to make our elders proud or at the very least laugh. I would love to do more Queer Field Guides with creative mates and create projects that enable me to experience different queer ecologies across the continent. I find traveling with a purpose and deep respect, sans the to do lists and the wanderlust, incredibly inspiring. As an outsider we don’t know what is assumed and therefore there is a lot to learn.
Where do you feel most creative and why?
I’m not sure it’s a place as much as a feeling. Sometimes I am uncontrollably crying, unable to do anything but sit in the sun like a lizard and other days I feel the rush and don’t even stop to pee. I think it is especially linked to where I am at in my cycle- I feel most creative and dreamy when I am bleeding- if I am not too grumpy or in pain I can synthesise all the feelings and thoughts I am having into a poem, or diagram. I can’t yet pinpoint when or where I will be creative, however sometimes I get flooded with ideas when I have space and time to think. I.E. in the pool for my daily swim or when I get away. My work is heavily inspired by my personal life and physical exposure, what I am doing and reading and watching and listening to and who I am in love with all contribute to the creative expressions.
What do you hope audiences take from your work?
Hmm a dash of ecological awareness and I would love to turn everyone gay…
Making books and creative works is frankly tumultuous. But amongst the depression and anxiety you will meet a kind optimism and, hopefully, a sense of humour. I hope audiences can find connection to the fragile and the hot tempered, erratic moments as well as those which bring calm. I have learnt a lot in the process of making books, especially through the relationships I have made and miss. I guess more than anything I hope people can relate and feel connected.
What gets you through creative challenges or tough industry times?
My very HAWTtt and funny partner, silly and caring friends, music, swimming, memes, watching trash tv and seeing/interacting with strange creatures outside of my suburban life. Occasionally I will pull a tarot card… Nothing too out of the ordinary and everything to avoid the harsh realities of capitalism. I also get loads out of going to art shows and getting amongst the local creative community. I especially love seeing mates thrive and flourish creatively!
What future projects are you looking forward to?
Well I am now committed to making 5 books for the PLATYPUS Essential series (completed water but still have food, waste, energy and shelter to do)… Next book will hopefully be about power and energy. Pending grants, the Queer Field Guide will take place in the Bowen Basin (Coal mine heaven) where I and a few other idiots hope to ride from mine to port in the name of “Pedal Power”. Like when I began 00-01 WATER I have no idea what the book will be full of in the end but I will prepare as much as I can and remain open to the possibilities.
Whose work are you digging at the moment?
I am so lucky to be surrounded by creative legends. I live in this big ridiculous Italian 4 story house my Nono built with amazing creatives. I love checking in with them and what they are doing. Currently Rae is currently busy making a short film called WAVE, Josh is always doing something fun – last time we spoke they had given themself a challenge of making a little film every month. Henry is always doing something smart as a historian(but the radical kind) and is an incredible musician(Lite Fails). The lovely Kat runs the very important Practice Studio and is an incredible seamstress and fashion icon. Roshan is a retired teacher and incredible radical thinker, they are constantly inspiring and teaching me, as well as editing my work. Miri is always exhibiting something special and is essential in my life. Also my partner Maeve and her band, Witness K whip out the most incredible sounds. So excited for their new album.
In the way of art I am obsessed with the work of Lionel Fogarty and Tay Haggarty, Sarah Poulgrain and Jordan Azcune. All of which in my new book launching Friday Feb 23.
In the way of art related books I am loving anything published by Common Room editions and designed by Paul Mylecharane of Public Office. Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical practice for art and art-based research, edited by Onomatopee strongly influenced my fieldwork in Mparntwe for 00-01 Water. Also classic queer ecology books such as Strange Natures by Nicole Seymour, Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz and essay Sex in Public by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have been helpful in defining what a Queer Field Guide actually is.
In the way of music I am loving my friend Mia Marcelle’s new EP, Soft Love. Dean Blunt, Spiceworld, Gia Margaret, Spike Fuck, Robyn, Carly Rae Jepsen and anything NTS radio.
In the way of film… I have been loving watching silly Bruce Lee movies with the housemates and also recently saw Tampopo(1985) and it blew my mind!
Where can we find and follow you online?
https://platypuspublication.com/
00-01 WATER launch: 23rd of Feb at Gladstone Road Studios in Highgate Hill.