MELBOURNE
IMAGE: X-Field Exhibition. Fortyfive Downstairs, Melbourne. Photographer: Marc Mor
X_Field MELBOURNE
Exhibition: 18-28 August 2010
fortyfive downstairs gallery
45 Flinders Lane
Melbourne 3000
Tel: 61 3 9662 9966
Fax +61 3 9962 9733
curator: Sand Helsel
exhibition managers: Lynda Roberts and Jemma Woolmore
design assistants: Emile Clare, Alice Edmonds, Ryan Moroney, Muizz Nazmi, Jacqui O’Brien, Liu Ashleigh Qing, Kiang How (Elvin) Tan, Sau Wei Teoh, Helen Walter, Erin Watson
X_Field incorporates project-based design research across the disciplines of art, architecture, landscape architecture, interior and urban design. Instead of focussing upon the differences between the disciplines, we capitalise on their common ground: the design methods, the scales and nature of engagement, the sites for action, and the methods of production and dissemination of the research. An interdisciplinary practice can identify the gaps that conventional practice has marginalised – as fertile opportunities for intervention. Broad areas of design research include art and the public realm; ephemeral architectures; social, political, economic and environmental infrastructures; and site-based studies in the urban field.
Conventional practice has clearly defined parameters and sites and scales of exploration. It is, all too often, object-driven on a tabula rasa with the practitioner positioned as the expert with a view from on high. We are critical of these assumptions and seek to reconceptualise the physical and social context of our actions and our role in the process.
IMAGE: X-Field Exhibition: Archive. Fortyfive Downstairs, Melbourne. Photographer: Ramesh Ayyar
We eschew formalism for processes, cycles, systems and forms of exchange. We design design methods to deal with the complexity of the world around us, some appropriated from other disciplines such as art practice: techniques of consultation and participatory intervention, observational and analytic tools, operative diagrams. We thrive in the realm of the speculative, where there is no right or wrong, only alternatives and possibilities to pose further questions.
The project foregrounds a direct engagement with its subject matter, of being there. The specificity of the field-based research avoids generalisation and extends beyond the physical to include the social, political, economic and transitory. We reveal the invisible systems that make things the way they are and to afford us alternative sites and forms of production
The project is inclusive rather than exclusive. The public focus of the design research, both in its content and in its dissemination through venues such as galleries, in street markets, and within local communities is designed to enable a continuing and significant engagement. This approach invites collaboration amongst practitioners, researchers, academics, students as well as this broader community.
The project is sponsored by the Design Research Institute at RMIT University and the RMIT School of Architecture and Design through the SRC funds.
The exhibition will tour (and return to Melbourne and in an expanded version) thanks to the assistance of the VESKI Award in Design 2010.
The X_Field Exhibition is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-Korea Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
