The Layers of the Gardens is an easy-to-use, hybrid art, culture, and community project commissioned for the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens. The project brief was to offer a rich media experience that creatively explores and reveals the layers of the City Botanica Gardens through creative interpretation across real and imagined histories, events, and perspectives, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultural understandings of the Place now known as the City Botanic Gardens. IM collaborated with local Elders to ensure the project was culturally safe, accessible, fun and family-friendly, ensuring their voices were at the heart of the project. The Layers of the Gardens remained live and maintained by IM for an extended period. Maintenance encompassed platform and content management requirements.

The challenge was to find effective, authentic, and culturally appropriate ways to make visible the complex, layered history of the Gardens’ ground, including its Indigenous histories, its colonial past, and its contemporary use as a vibrant natural environment and a public green space in the heart of the city. The project’s vision was to go beyond traditional interpretive signage and wayfinding to achieve an inclusive discovery experience that fostered meaningful engagement and connection to the Place.

IM applied its ‘Walking Together: Place, Create, and Leave a Legacy’ methodology to co-design the project with local Elders and the Council’s stakeholders. The solution involved developing a digital interactive experience and accompanying creative outputs to facilitate deep listening and sharing of stories. The methodology focused on the ‘Place’ stage to uncover unique considerations, the ‘Create’ stage for deep listening and knowledge sharing, and the ‘Leave a Legacy’ stage to build connections and create new individual and combined memories.

The Layers of the Garden delivered an engaging and playful outcome for the City Botanic Gardens and its many local and international visitors. Through geo-located nodes of creative engagement and activities, visitors had the opportunity to explore and connect with the location through a variety of real and imagined times and events.

This unique hybrid project leverages digital and analogue platforms to successfully reveal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture through digital vignettes, alongside physical discovery activities, including a children-focused game that makes the invisible visible.

By employing a culturally safe, co-design approach, the project established a model for inclusive and meaningful engagement in the interpretation of cultural sites, while ensuring a sustainable legacy that benefits everyone.