RADICAL UTOPIA: An Archaeology of a Creative City

BACKGROUND: Taking as its starting point the collections of the RMIT Design Archives this research explores the legacy of Postmodern design from 1980’s Melbourne. It is aligned with other major exhibitions including the Victoria and Albert’s Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011) and the National Gallery of Victoria’s Mix Tape 1980s: Appropriation, Subculture, Critical Style (2013). While these exhibitions had a focus on style, Radical Utopia is more concerned with the cultural and intellectual infrastructure that underpin the works on display. CONTRIBUTION: Curators Edquist and Stuckey grouped the exhibition into four themes: fashion and nightlife; architecture as idea; social and political protest; and the emergence of digital design an aera that has previously not been addressed in a design context. (Prof Swalwell was invited to contribute to the curation of Digital Design). A focus was placed on collaborative endeavour, sociability and the community discourses. In this way the exhibition seeks to describe the conditions of an emergent culture in 1980’s Melbourne. This approach enables a way to think about how cities such as Melbourne develop cultural identities. As such, the curatorial stance is propositional rather than declarative. SIGNIFICANCE: The exhibition is significant in its distinctive research focus, media impact, and peer recognition. It offers an important profile of the richness of the RMIT Design Archives. The exhibition themes informed an accompanying special issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal, enabling the curatorial approach to have ongoing impact within scholarly discourse. The exhibition had high visitation numbers and was favourably reviewed by the New York Times, The Australian Book Review, and the online journal Fluro. The exhibition received the 2023 Australian Museums and Galleries Association Victoria small project award.