Cost of Passage | Utu o te Haerenga reimagines Auckland’s familiar sign poles as unexpected platforms for solidarity.
The project was originally envisioned as a deeply personal cartography, featuring plaster self-portraits—stamped with the kind of "all-about-me" shields we made in primary school—hung along a route tracing my own encounters with homelessness. This intimate, guerrilla pilot was designed to test a model of grassroots art that transforms a routine commute into a direct, empathetic transaction.
That core concept has now evolved into its mature, commissioned form for Karangahape Road. Replacing the temporary busts are permanent, beautifully designed metal plates, mounted directly onto the poles they poetically repurpose. These ritual vessels retain the original's invitation for a small offering, but refine it into a low-friction, anonymous act of giving. The journey is no longer just a personal path, but a sustained, collective ritual embedded in the heart of the city, now amplified through partnership with ten local charities that represent a full ecosystem of community care.
These partnerships—including Auckland City Mission and Lifewise addressing immediate homelessness, Fix Up Look Sharp creating pathways to employment, Endometriosis NZ supporting often-invisible health struggles, and Nurturing Families ensuring strong beginnings—expand the work's meaning. Together with Kickback, Māpura Studios, Good Shepherd, and Big Buddy, they reflect the many interconnected "costs" of passage through urban life, from survival and health to opportunity and creative expression.
Inspired by the bootstrapped momentum of earlier projects and heeding advice to start small, this K Road iteration gathers technical know-how and public engagement for future expansion. It fulfills the project's initial promise on a broader scale, transforming the concept of "passage" from a personal memory into a functional, city-wide gesture. The title's double meaning remains: it still highlights both the literal expense of moving through Auckland and the far greater human cost borne by its most vulnerable, testing a model of public art that sparks empathy and creates a sustained, observable ritual of reciprocity in the very streets that define our urban life.
Original Bustography Concept