League of Resonance

League of Resonance (2011) was a site-responsive collaboration between Jason Maling, Jess Olivieri, and Sarah Rodigari, commissioned by the City of Melbourne’s Arts and Participation Program to engage with the southern end of Elizabeth Street—a notorious “trouble spot” in the city’s folklore. The council sought an alternative approach to ‘inner city violence’; the artists responded by forming a kind of “bad vibe club,” a loose association dedicated to detecting the area’s underlying hum—not literal sounds, but the background myths, rituals, and unspoken codes that shape its reputation.

Over four months, the trio embedded themselves in the site—walking, talking, drinking, meeting people both day and night. They collected and retold stories, introduced strangers to each other, and slowly assembled an informal network of residents, workers, and regular visitors. These fragments became “League trading cards,” each capturing a piece of local lore, which in turn fueled a tongue-in-cheek Good Works Programme—from manually torch-lighting points of aesthetic interest to assisting drunk pedestrians across busy streets.

Lucas Ihlein, writing in his commissioned essay, described these activities as uncovering “the marginal, largely invisible forms of social glue” that hold a place together. Rather than imposing predetermined outcomes, the project worked through attentive presence, conversation, and low-key interventions to shift the narrative tone of the site. By blending performance, civic play, and neighborly mischief, League of Resonance offered an alternative model of urban engagement—one rooted not in consultation reports, but in the cumulative resonance of shared stories and the slow work of belonging.