Exterior Monologue

About the event

Exterior Monologue reflects on both built landscape sites and non-sites to explore how daily use, sensory experience and embedded memories continually build place beyond the initial design intent. Drawing on the motifs of the YouTube POV live streaming or ‘walking videos,’ invited participants are asked to make a video or audio piece focussed 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/ movements of another. The resulting collage of contributions creates 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.

About the speakers

Virginia Overell is a landscape architect and artist based in Naarm. She has a deep interest in design that performs both ecologically and therapeutically and is passionate about the potential for public space to elicit joy and pleasure, particularly within a dense urban context. As an artist she has exhibited at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Gertrude Contemporary, TarraWarra Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Victoria: Australia and as part of the Tbiilisi Triennial in Georgia. Currently, she is working as a senior landscape architect at OCULUS.

Olivia O’Donnell is a registered landscape architect based in Naarm with a background in fine art. Material investigations, prototyping and circularity inform Olivia’s approach to practice with projects spanning streetscapes, public housing and education. She is currently co-leading an adaptive reuse studio in the architecture faculty at RMIT.

Olivia and Virginia run an intermittent newsletter Out There - a place to collate and share links, ideas, tangents, circumnavigating landscape. They are both members of Second Place, a collective opening dialogues around alternative and expanded modes of landscape architectural practice.