PROJECTS
IMAGES: X-Field Exhibition, 2010. Photo: Marc Mor, Ramesh Ayyar and Kiang How (Elvin) Tan
The X_Field projects in the exhibition evolve from lengthy conversation and discourse. Whilst we maintain the integrity of our individual practices and continue to contribute to our respective disciplines, collectively we establish common ground in this process.
We work across a series of scales: from river systems to the minutiae of everyday life and the celebration of the banal, with a material thinking and presence. We share a fascination with the transitory and the ephemeral, the actions of people, growth and decay, and things outside of our control. We find solace in the margins: of our professional standings, at the water’s edge and amidst invisible social, political, and economic divides.
Our ambition is to make this dialogue accessible and public, by exhibiting in respected galleries, through public symposia with international colleagues, and through participatory projects and subject matter that resonates within a larger community.
Charles Anderson
A House for Hermes #05, 2010 – 2012
IMAGE : A House for Hermes #05. Generative processes. Charles Anderson
Homelessness, displacement, exile, accelerated mobility, flux; all seem to define the contemporary condition. If routes really do proceed roots, if the overwhelming experience of contemporary life is one of fluidity, if we are all vulnerable strangers, what of the house? What constitutes home and place? Where are we to dwell? How are we to make our home in the world? How is place to be made?
These questions of home, house, dwelling and place are the basis of the House for Hermes Project. A House for Hermes #05 attempts to create a contemporary dwelling via an open-ended re-collection of spatial experience.
Each member of the X-Field group has been asked to draw from memory a floor plan of a house which has played a significant role in their lives. From these combined drawings a new collective ‘house’ will be generated and configured within the exhibition space.
As the project moves from country to country, new floor plans drawn by the participants from each new city will be added and the collective house consequently progressively transformed and reconfigured. Over time an evolving morphology of global dwelling may emerge from this ongoing conversation performed at a local level.
Perhaps this is an intuition of dwelling not as a house which becomes to our former selves what the corpse is to the living body, but a house which spatialises a different thinking of time, memory and the dynamic of recollection.
Richard Black
Mobile Landscapes, 2010
According to the English Oxford Dictionary, a site, as a noun word refers to ‘an area of ground on which something is located’ [1]. In architecture, a site is commonly understood to be a parcel of land having dimensioned boundaries that define its location and size. To imagine a site connected into its surroundings is to move it into more dynamic territory.
Sites interact, spatially and conceptually, with other places. This can occur at a number of levels. An unobstructed visual field can bring near, middle distance and the distant horizon into relationship. An ecological point of view can also contribute to connecting near and far, particularly when landscape systems such as water catchments form networks that do not adhere to property or statutory boundaries. It is this reciprocity and interconnectedness between the micro and macro scales of landscape, which challenges an interpretation of site as a bounded piece of property.
The proposal for the exhibition is a series of mappings of the River Murray addressing these concerns. A collection of drawings, text and archival images are combined, revealing a personal interpretation of the Murray floodplain. This work captures an intimate and remote reading of this vast landscape, where the transitory aspects of the landscape and living patterns are brought into relationship.
This working method reveals the creative potential of site analysis as a generative influence upon an architectural design process – where a site is constantly understood at a range of scales and times, and at many levels of engagement, from the ecological, to the political and the personal.
Mel Dodd (muf_aus)
Diorama Bench, 2010
The Diorama Bench is an installation that moves between the scale of the architectural model, and the scale of the gallery; between the 1:100 and the 1:1. It both refers to design proposals for a small public reserve, as well as speculating on broader and more difficult ideas about the values of un-designed space, feral land and the rural urban fringe: a world of transgressions, making cubbies, having fires and behaving badly.
Taking its cue from the ‘diorama’ which are three-dimensional miniature models, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase and often used for museums, the installation is in part a microcosmic representation of all the messy details of everyday life – an antidote to the formal models of architects and designers.
The installation includes fragments from the life of the West Park Housing Estate in Hastings, and is set out on a plinth constructed as an outdoor hybrid ‘bench’ – 400mm high and approximately 2 m x 4 m. In fact, because of its construction - a welded steel sub frame and reclaimed timber planks – this installation will operate largely as a distorted and odd shape bench, reminiscent of those found in national parks and on nature walks. In operating between these two scales the installation is both a piece of public furniture, and an opportunity for insights into what public space might be.
“the Kings Creek river just runs down the back down there…for people to just chuck stuff in the backtracks. That’s where people go motorbike riding, lizard hunting, snake hunting. They take the trailers in, coz they can’t in the bush. Coz, it costs money to dump it and all that. Um, they just go, and they drive in just there coz there’s a big entrance. And they drive in and they just dump it where ever. Yeah, and then um, people like take that stuff and make cubbies out of it.”
Sand Helsel
Urban Still Lifes (with mops and brooms), 2010
These images are far from still. They capture moments from the active life of the city and its inhabitants that are often ignored or deliberately hidden. They depict an informal occupation of the public realm that lies outside of ownership and traditional property lines, and which blurs the edges between public and private, civic and domestic. This is urban design from the bottom up which is a viable alternative to the masterplan drawn by the expert from above. Good cities allow for the voices of its inhabitants to be heard (and seen) through accretions over time. Do you live in a good city?
There are multiple authors in this piece (and in the design of the city): the inhabitants who place their mops in the street to provide these vignettes; Sand Helsel who observes this activity and grants it the status of ‘urban still life’ in her photographs located within the context of the gallery; and now you.
Gallery visitors and colleagues are invited to insert one of the Urban Still Life posters into their city as a technique to carefully look at, question and critique the places where we live and work. A photograph of these interventions, accompanied by a title, credit and description, are returned and then mounted on the gallery wall .The collection of photographs will be cumulative and comparative as the exhibition tours to Beijing, Seoul, and Taipei. The scale shifts from the small mop to a map of the world.
Posting the bill requires a commitment and an engagement, as does designing in the city. It is the responsibility of the architect and urban designer to curate the city from the rich material at hand, in order to provide opportunities for the multiple voices of its citizens to be heard.
Returned “DIY Urban Still Life” and text (Photo left: Sand Helsel. Photo right: Muizz Adam Nazmi).
Muizz Adam Nazmi. Please don’t give me a ticket – I am arranging for it to be toed (sic) , 2010.
13 August 2010. Cnr Peel St & Wellington St, Collingwood, Victoria, Australia
This is a still life on top a still life – a giant ticket on the charred bonnet of parked car in front of The Peel dance club in Collingwood. Taken just before the arrival of the Friday night crowds, this act of issuing a figurative summons raised a few eyebrows – particularly those of the female bouncer standing ten feet away and the meticulously manicured ones of a posse of Drag queens who came to park their car next to this one, crying ‘paparazzi!’ as I took out my camera.
Andrea Mina
Who’s DNA?, 2010
‘Whose DNA’ is a collection of chewing and bubble gum retrieved from the underside of desks, worktops and chairs located within the School of Architecture and Design teaching spaces housed in RMIT’s design award winning Building 8. These carefully discarded artefacts comprise a collection of the most intensely designed and intimately made objects crafted by none other than tomorrow’s leaders of design.
It is worth contemplating the nature of this making and the fact of it being produced in the mouth, a space that may be considered to be amongst the most private and most intimate of bodily spaces. Well may we readily extend our hands to be clasped and caressed by complete strangers in greeting, not so the inside of our mouth which is a space protected from outside contact, a space which is rarely intruded upon and seldom touched by strangers. Yet this place of extreme sensitivity and intimacy is the site of manufacture of these discarded pieces of gum. From such intimate contact and privacy to the care-less act of the public abandonment of material artefact, civic respect and responsibility.
These carefully concealed artefacts will last for a very long time as the gum is manufactured from latex, the same material used in the manufacture of motorcar tyres; an unseen, yet permanent part of the public realm. ‘Whose DNA’ has made use of the anonymity of generic matchbox containers to contain and contrast with the specificity of each unique piece of salvaged gum.
Sue Anne Ware
RAir Collection, 2010
In 1901 Australia passed the Immigration Restriction Act, also known as the White Australia Policy. Seven years later The Quarantine Act 1908 created the foundations for Australian customs regulations. In 1919 Marcel Duchamp asked a pharmacist to empty a glass ampoule of its original contents and resealed it, so that it contained 50 cc of Paris air, Air de Paris (1919). “The glass is transparent, but what it holds is both within an interior space and invisible; we can continue to maintain it in the state that makes us desire it- that is, maintain the air in its Parisian purity- only as long as we do not yield to the temptation to experience it physically.”[2]
I became obsessed with collecting air in 2008, partially because of very strict Australian customs regulations against bringing in soil, rocks, seeds, or plant materials but mainly because of our hideously intolerant immigration policies. Duchamp’s claim to Parisian purity only remains so if things are kept sealed. In this exhibition I invite others to collect, map, and send me their air. RAir Collection offers a space to play between imagination, memory, and perpetuated desires but it is also very deliberate political act. It ridicules our attempts to keep environments and our cultures pure. By capturing a mundane but vital source of life on this planet, I hope we can examine our own ridiculous attitudes towards so-called invasive species.
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[1] Oxford Dictionary online, www.askoxford.com/dictionary. The compact Oxford English Dictionary entry for site: ‘noun 1, an area of ground on which something is located’ and;’verb, fix or build in a particular place’.
[2] Seigel, Jerrold. (1995) The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, p.168.
