MPavilion

MMeets—Reading about homes with Tai Snaith • 8 Nov 2015 by MPavilion

MTalks—Robin Boyd Foundation pres. Designing a family home • 12 Nov 2015 by MPavilion

How is intelligent design redefining the workplace? Businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of investing in workplace design; sustainable designs that promote workplace wellness and respond to the needs of the contemporary office are shaping reputations of businesses and making them more attractive to job seekers. Listen to Dan Cox—Carr Design Group’s director of commercial inte...

MTalks—Student Organised Network for Architecture summer workshop • 9 Nov 2015 by MPavilion

Launch time! In 2015, MPavilion teamed up with Art Monthly Australia and the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) to create a new annual award supporting critical writing. Australian essayists were invited to submit a proposal for a piece exploring the relationship between art and design today. The inaugural recipient was Dr Julia Jones, who received $3,000 to develop her proposed essay...

Become an urban beekeeper and help out the humble honey bee! Hear Swarm Trap teammates Honey Fingers and Many Many in this MMeets workshop—presented by Hotel Hotel’s new series of workshops and talks, Fix and Make—and make a swarm trap (a safe house for honey bees). You’ll learn about swarming and how swarm traps work, as well as the best time and locations to install them, before making one to ta...

Melbourne artist and author Tai Snaith joined us under AL_A’s canopy reading from her all-time favourite picture books about homes. Done over three readings in November and one in January, Tai looked at the different ways people live—and reads from her own book 'Sticks and Stones, Animal Homes'. Perfect listen for the young ones in your life.

Language is all around us. We overhear people speaking on mobile phones, we read huge quantities of words online, and we see phrases and idioms on billboards, on t-shirts and in shop windows. If every word were a drop of rain, we’d drown in a flood each and every day. But what are we to do with all this language? Listen to writer, editor and printer Robert Wood in this lunchtime session exploring...

Following her curious, caterpillar-like performances as The Buddhist Bug on opening weekend of the eighth Asia Pacific Triennial (APT8) at QAGOMA in Brisbane, Cambodian artist Anida Yoeu Ali came to MPavilion for an in-depth discussion with Sarah Bond, director of visual arts at Asialink Arts. Anida discusses her interdisciplinary practice—and, specifically, illuminates us about her APT8-commissio...

Got an apartment to make? Join Chris McCue, director of architecture at Carr Design Group, for a workshop that saw an apartment collaboratively take shape, from floor plan to fittings and fixtures. Sharpen your pencils and start jotting down ideas. #MPavilion

What makes us Australian in 2015, individually and collectively? And how are our diverse selves represented in art, design and stories? Listen here and find the answers—via a panel discussion courtesy of video arts festival Channels and the UK’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT). A satellite event of the Human Futures Forum—an international “symposium on place” hosted by FACT at th...

“If the Anthropocene is how we label our current geologic epoch, then its cultural corollary is the Anthroposcenic, an era in which our understanding of nature and culture are re-integrated.” —William L Fox, director of the Center for Art + Environment, Reno, Nevada Before his address at NGV International, William L Fox took a seat at MPavilion for a chat with Guy Abrahams (co-founder and CEO of C...

It’s time for Consortium, round two! This brought Gertrude Contemporary, West Space, RMIT Design Hub and Next Wave presenting the second in our series of conversations about the issues within (and surrounding) emerging and experimental art and design. At our inaugural discussion, a panel of artists, writers and feminists spoke honestly and thoughtfully about art’s many invisible hands. This time a...

Between 30 November and 11 December 2015, COP21—the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties, also known as the 2015 Paris Climate Conference—will, after twenty years of UN negotiations, aim to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. While nation leaders will make the ultimate decisions at the confer...

Is the spirit of multiculturalism still alive in Australia today? Is it relevant? And who decides what it means, anyway? Listen back to a lively Wednesday night panel discussion featuring voices from the arts, the social sector and academia: Nikos Papastergiadis, director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures; Moya McFadzean, senior curator of migration and cultural diversity in the humanities d...

The spaces we inhabit—whether built, psychological or digital—are the foundations of our health and happiness. How, then, do our ever-evolving urban environments and shared public spaces guide the way we behave? And what can we learn from both science and design about the relationship between our mental and physical environments? Listen to our panellists—scientists Julie Bernhardt and Emma Burrows...

Today, the choreographed and performed body is not confined to the studio or a black-box theatre; instead, it occurs in spaces initially dedicated to other art forms—or even in spaces that aren’t designed for art at all. Listen in to the first in our series of three Saturday afternoon salon conversations with acclaimed French choreographer Xavier Le Roy, co-presented by Dancehouse, that aim to lin...

Spend your evening with Tom Bloxham, founder of award-winning United Kingdom urban regeneration company Urban Splash. With just a ‘wholehearted belief in cities’ to guide them, Tom and founding partner Jonathan Falkingham began their business by filling empty buildings in the English cities of Liverpool and Manchester. Their work—which includes the revitalisation of Sheffield’s iconic Brutalist co...

“The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” So said William Gibson, an American-Canadian science-fiction writer (who also, incidentally, coined the term ‘cyberspace’ in his 1982 short story ‘Burning Chrome’)—and it’s this quote that has inspired the 2016 Biennale of Sydney. Helmed by artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal, the twentieth instalment of Australia’s largest contempor...

Hear a discussion about the history of women shaping the Australian city—its buildings, spaces, and social and political agendas. Led by Parlour, an advocacy organisation dedicated to expanding the spaces for women in Australian architecture, the evening’s panellists—architectural historian Dr Karen Burns, editor and researcher Justine Clark, social historian Renate Howe, urbanist Jane Jose and ar...

“In a wondrous world of riddles and hidden treasure, bumbling Jack Hare is on a race against time to deliver a message of love from the Moon to the Sun.” Pack a picnic, round up the kids and join us for a live Saturday-lunchtime reading of Kit Williams’s iconic 1979 picture book Masquerade. The magical story—which sparked a real-life treasure hunt for a golden hare necklace buried in a secret loca...

Six culturally and linguistically diverse spoken-word poets drop in to MPavilion in October for two Spoken Word Sessions—and this is the second. The lunchtime slams are highlights of Igniting Imagination—a collaboration between Melbourne Festival and Multicultural Arts Victoria that brings exceptional talent from Australia’s emerging, Indigenous and refugee communities to the stage. Featured in th...

What happens when designers get together for show-and-tell? How alike—or at odds—are their approaches to similar projects? Join us as Nick Wood, founder and director of London-based How About Studio and the Australian Institute of Architect’s first Droga Architect in Residence for 2015/16, chats with Melbourne design collective Sibling (represented this evening by architects Amelia Borg, Nicholas...

You’ve heard it online, in magazines and in this very program, but what does the buzz term ‘placemaking’ actually mean and involve? Co-presented by Neometro and Australian quarterly Dumbo Feather, this panel—made up of Neometro’s director James Tutton (who is also co-founder and director of Smiling Mind) and Dumbo Feather’s community manager Madeline Lucas—will deconstruct the word and much more i...

The VCA’s Art, Social and Spatial Practice (ASSP) research cluster brings its salon-style Food for Thought series to MPavilion—and expands it. Hosted by Performing Mobilities’ James Oliver and Mick Douglas, this pop-up forum with Brooklyn-based artist Marshall Weber and Sydney-based “anarchitect” Keg de Souza will investigate the potential of both the material and social production of art as objec...