Melbourne Design Week: Exterior Monologue

7 May 2024

By OCULUS

A video still of a narrow path. There are long clumps of grass on either side. A caption reads "I didn't know if I could go in there."

Melbourne Design Week is Australia’s largest annual design event presenting innovative and engaging projects. Now in its eighth year, Melbourne Design Week, held 23 May – 2 June 2024, celebrates the diversity and excellence of Australian design and architecture.

The 2024 edition brings into focus the use of energy, ethics, and ecology to encourage positive change, reimagine existing systems, and offer innovative design solutions to complex global challenges. 

OCULUS Senior Landscape Architect Virginia Overell has curated an exhibition with Olivia O’Donnell for the Melbourne School of Design which will run from Thursday 23 May to Friday 31 May.

Exterior Monologue is a video projection installation, reflecting on both built landscape sites and non-sites to explore how daily use, sensory experience and embedded memories continually build place beyond initial design intent.

Drawing on the motifs of the YouTube POV (point of view) live streaming or ‘walking videos,’ participants were invited to make a video or audio piece focused on a landscape/exterior place of their choice. The responses range from ambient and meditative to dynamic and active and offer a perception of place through the eye, words, and movements of another.

The resulting collage of contributions create a partial map, spanning seasons and time zones, layering the spatial and social dynamics of space to communicate the making of place through everyday use and subjective experience.

Melbourne Design Week is an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and delivered by the NGV. This is a free exhibition, bookings are not required.

Weekdays: 8:00am – 6:00pm
Weekends: 10:00am – 6:00pm

Leo Simon Entranceway, Glyn Davis Building (Melbourne School of Design),
Masson Road, Parkville (Please visit the event page for directions.)

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