A long table lunch exploring the generative potential of queering in and around the discipline of landscape architecture. How can we harness queering as mode of critique to break from normative paradigms and imagine alternative and expanded modes of landscape practice?
Guests, including Pip Wallis, Alistair Kirkpatrick, Brent Greene, Darius Le, Sarah Hicks and Felipe Coral, discuss the method of queering and how it applies across the built environment in considering more-than-human urbanism, ‘failed’ ecologies and systems thinking. This will take place over a shared meal made by Fluff Corp.
Pip Wallis
Pip Wallis is one of five curators working on the forthcoming NGV Collection exhibition Queer ( December 2021). Pip was previously Managing Editor, X-TRA Quarterly Art Journal Los Angeles, Curator in Residence, Chisenhale Gallery London, and Curator, Gertrude Contemporary.
Alistair Kirkpatrick
Alistair has had a varied career over the last 20 years working in the disciplines of garden design, landscape architecture, horticulture and academia. Through teaching and practice Alistair has been exploring and testing ideas of vegetation as being the primary form, distorting the current model of hardscape being the dominant element in projects.
Brent Greene
Brent lectures into the Landscape Architecture Programs at RMIT, is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, and a visual artist. His research explores how diverse cultural interpretations of urban ecology and landscape (designed or otherwise) influence attitudes towards public open space in the City of Melbourne and internationally.
Darius Le
Darius Le is an architectural design researcher interested in the intersection of urban spectacle and the appropriation of infrastructure. Her research argues that these concerns have the potential to reconfigure the relations between infrastructure, heritage values and representation. She considers the failed Melbourne Olympic bids as an exemplary that could inform future design speculations for the city.
Sarah Hicks
Sarah is a practicing landscape architect and a director of Bush Projects Landscape Architecture based in Melbourne. Bush Projects is a cross disciplinary landscape architecture studio, comprising a team of artists and landscape architects. The practice investigates the way people experience and interact with landscape focusing on human occupation, ecological processes and aesthetic consequences.
Felipe Coral
Felipe is a Colombian-Canadian Landscape Architect currently working with Bush Projects in Melbourne. His research work focuses on the relevance of informal urban activity and cultural expression to shape public landscapes.
Fluff Corp.
Fluff Corp. is the creative partnership between ceramic artists Claire Lehmann and Jia Jia Chen. Using the material’s history to inform a range of ceramic activities, Fluff Corp. aims to explore the connective and social potential of the medium, it’s intimacy and ubiquity in daily life and its relationship to food and design culture.
AILA Cultivate
AILA Cultivate aims to open dialogues around alternative and expanded modes of landscape architectural practice through conversations and collaborations with other disciplines, including art, architecture, industrial design and publishing. We seek to interrogate and explore how other disciplines can inform and enrich our understanding of landscape and design and the ethical and philosophical issues that underpin how we position ourselves and our practice as agents in the transformation of the environment. AILA Cultivate is chaired by Virginia Overell, with Jen Lynch, Ella Gauci-Seddon, Olivia O’Donnell, Emily Wong and Nicholas Braun.