Archipelago - Embracing Uncertainty
Melbourne Design Week, 2021
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer…”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Archipelago is a curated exhibition showcasing the major projects of 2020 photomedia capstone students. Engaging with image-making, design, film, sound, projection and installation; these emerging creatives have been inspired by the unique, yet shared, peculiarity of the first Covid-19 lockdown. Taking inspiration from Rainer Maria Rilke, students embarked on a journey to explore the concepts, ideas and messages embedded in these powerful words and sentiments and learned through the creative process to embrace the uncertainty and doubt, and trust in their own intuition and process. Despite the forced isolation, these 17 unique minds have demonstrated the boundless malleability of community, through personal reflection and visual storytelling as narrative intervention. In a world where human connection and wellness is impacted by an increasing reliance on digital technologies, artificial connectivity and separation from the natural realm, Archipelago serves as a reminder of what separated and distant individuals can achieve together, for the long-term benefit of community and environment.
Clockwise from top
Lockdown Interviews, Alysha Magro: Deeper than thirst, Geordie McKenzie: Bloom, Zac Gray: Euterria; Gertie Hall: Solace.
Echo: Transcending Temporality
Capstone Exhibition, 2021
The 2021 Photomedia graduation exhibition explored themes of introspection, climate crisis, mental health, gender and identity, isolation and social transformation through image-making, film, participatory media practices (such as podcasting) and installation. These works have been created within the 2021 lockdown and are a response to the spatio-temporal boundaries of their own lives and yearning for freedom and answers to what seems like relentless uncertainty, inspired by Rilke (1903). Despite facing the challenge of isolation, disconnection, and reluctant self-reflection, the students were reminded that what they manifest, create and share with others is capable of transcending time and space to create alternate futures. Our voices will continue to resound, echoing back and embedded in our actions and the lives of people around us.
Clockwise: Laura King: Dream State, Daniel Pergolini: Abode, Amara Bett: Second Skin, Davzon Toy: What if?
