Dates
Fri 15 May 2 – 2.30pm
Talks Stage, NGV International
Australia is at the frontline of the climate crisis. While worsening natural disasters and species extinction are met with glacial shifts in national climate policy, an important undercurrent of projects working to repair the Australian narrative are at play.
Repair Stories (Perimeter Editions 129), a new collection of texts edited by Lucy Benjamin, Hélène Frichot and Virginia Mannering, unpicks the concealing power of disrepair by giving life to reparative projects already at work in the context of the Australian built environment – both in theory and in practice.
These stories seek to repair a continent that continues to live under the structuring logic of colonial dispossession and extractive economies.
Featuring contributions from architects, artists, designers and educators, Repair Stories interrogates the methods, limitations, obligations and potential of repair, and proposes repair as an environmental imperative.
The launch brings together editors Lucy Benjamin, Hélène Frichot and Virginia Mannering with contributors Camille Perry, Simon Robinson and Nina Tory-Henderson to ask questions about Australia’s past, and how we can collaborate on repairing its future.
Participants
Lucy Benjamin
Lucy Benjamin is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.
Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in architecture and philosophy at the University of Melbourne.
Her research is situated at the intersection of architecture and critical theory.
Her first book, Planetary Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), offers a planetary rereading of Hannah Arendt’s political theory.
Hélène Frichot
Hélène Frichot is an architectural theorist and philosopher, writer and critic, and an Honorary Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK.
Previously, she was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture at KTH Stockholm, Sweden.
In 2020 she was appointed Professor of Architecture and Philosophy in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Dr Virginia Mannering
Dr Virginia Mannering is an academic in architectural design at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne.
Her research examines how the construction of the settler-colonial city has reshaped landscapes, the built environment and its relationships with the Anthropocene, and the flows of construction materials across time and space.
Nina Tory-Henderson
Nina Tory-Henderson is an architect and researcher based in Melbourne/Naarm.
She is currently a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, and an architect at NMBW Architecture Studio.
Camille Perry
Camille Perry is a queer lens-based artist whose work considers the industrialisation of memory production and the alchemical nature of the image.
Her work engages with the complexities of photographic practice, informed by encounters with places that prompt research-driven ecological inquiries.
Informed by her experience of working in a film-developing laboratory, Perry is fascinated with the complexity of deciphering significance in a world exhausted by images and the materials depended on for their production.
Perry’s alternative photographic techniques apply biodegradable materials to illustrate alchemical deep time.
She is the founder of Collective Agitation, a group dedicated to testing and sharing recipes that work with forageable invasive flora to develop and print analogue images.
Perry has held workshops internationally, including the ‘Collective Agitation’ Alternative Film Processing Seminar at ‘Un-Instructing Photography’ at KASK & Conservatorium, Ghent, Belgium, and the Joya Artist Residency Program, Vélez Blanco, Spain.
Simon Robinson
Simon Robinson is a founding director of OFFICE, a not-for-profit multidisciplinary design and research practice based in Naarm/Melbourne.
OFFICE’s projects span the intersections of built form, research, discourse and education.
As a registered charity, the studio’s operations, processes and outputs are bound by a constitution to make projects for the public good.