‘Multidwelling’ displays the changing texture of Melbourne’s streetscape, as the great Australian dream shrinks and a denser Australian ugliness increases. Strange outcroppings of brick, timber and stone veneer, with unblinking aluminium-framed eyes, rise up in the wake of every bungalow demolition. Will they last long enough to accrete their own cultural capital? Should they? Is our addiction to tasteful, detached period homes a greedy, first world indulgence, and yet another manifestation of climate crisis denial? Or do we risk losing the fragile membrane of social memory and identity that our built environment focuses and coheres? ‘Multidwelling’ raises these questions, connecting them to the fraught position of the independent arts scene, itself mired in the real estate market, tethered to the architecture of the white cube.

Zoe Diacolabrianos is a practicing architectural graduate, who has worked in a number of small practices in Melbourne, within the field of residential architecture and is now based at WOWOWA Architecture. She has had an ongoing interest in notions of domesticity, with a particular focus on the means by which architecture can facilitate moments of dissent and adaptive reinterpretation, to encourage agency in the way we inhabit our spaces. Beyond her interests in the fields of architecture and the built environment, she has a background in Film Theory, Literature and Design, which has continued to infiltrate into her architectural work. Outside of her work in professional practices, she has been involved in a Design-Build studio, working with Remote Indigenous Communities in the Northern Territory. She has also been involved in collaborative projects with a number of international designers, and her work has been exhibited in Stockholm (2010) and Melbourne (2013, 2015). She currently teaches in the School of Architecture at The University of Melbourne.

Eamon Sprodd explores re-contextualised collected sounds and tactile gestures formed into dynamic, psycho-geographical compositions inspired by discarded things, found things, crawling around in the dirt, junk, the ground, rocks, dust, wind, walking aimlessly, scratchy things, decay and most if not all the things he hears and sees. More than simply documenting a given site, tarab is interested in a direct engagement with our surrounds, teasing out half narratives, visceral sensation, false leads and heightened awareness.

See also: Medium Density