Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival

imagined artefacts of a fictional festival

Design for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival was developed by Dunne & Raby for NGV Triennial 2023.

Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival depicts the imagined artefacts of a fictional festival celebrating a shift in the collective mindset of human beings. Moving away from a human-centric viewpoint, it is imagined by designers Dunne & Raby that humanity could come to understand its place in a multi-species reality, where each organism perceives and experiences their shared environments from a unique sensory perspective. Accompanying the totems and mementos, which illustrate how human-produced sound, fragrance and matter is experienced by other species, a festival costume, including a hat, shoes, glove and rucksack, suggests the celebratory garments of another time and place. Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival asks humans to imagine how they impact the worlds of other species and how their presence is perceived and spatialised.

Introducing Dunne & Raby to my own mycelial practice, the mycelium racksack was developed in collaboration with the duo. Relinquishing much of our own control, we left the outcome of this piece to the ganoderma mycelium that constructed it. The result is a rucksack designed to represent the wearers’ own biomass, their ecological value.

All artefacts were produced by RMIT School of Design.