2014 Summer Residency

Pin-up is excited to announce Matthew Bird (Studiobird) and Phillip Adams (BalletLab) as 2014 Summer Residents with a new collaborative project – EMBASSY.

EMBASSY brings together a visual playground of experimental architecture, visual design / performance research and practice. Working with curator Fleur Watson – co-founder of Pin-up – the residency will provide a platform for an ongoing exchange.

Phillip and Matthew have been engaged within interdisciplinary practice since 2010 with projects including the award-winning Aviary presented at the Melbourne Festival (2011) & MONA FOMA (2012) and, more recently, And All Things Return To Nature Tomorrow presented at The Lawler, Melbourne Theatre Company (2013).

During these few short years Matthew and Phillip have formed a collaborative practice of experimental and unconventional projects straddling multiple disciplines of architecture, installation art, performing art and choreography. Together, their body of work has developed a loyal following and is increasingly attracting international media interest.

The residency will result in the physical construction of a large and speculative embassy ‘foundation’ structure; experimenting with ready-made materials in a complex formation testing possible future notions of embassy groundwork, blueprint, form and aesthetic.

Inspired by the notion of the object itself and how it can be deposited outside its usual static context, BalletLab and Studiobird are interested in arousing public curiosity and engaging speculative embassy environments by placing unusual constructs in populated civic environments as an experiential refuge space.

An underlying philosophy to the EMBASSY project proposal is a research interest in unpredictability, experimentalism and to a degree ‘unreasonable’ collective practice. Concepts are bold, broad and universal with references to popular culture, science fiction, high art, modernism and participatory art.

The outcome of the Pin-up residency will form the foundation of the project’s ongoing development with plans to extend the collaboration within a national and international context. This aspiration is in keeping with Pin-up’s agenda to lead, support and expose the process of developing architectural and design ideas and to support cross-disciplinary creative exchange within an independent, community space.