Jiafei Huang, [Re]petition [×]

[Re]petition uses Melbourne's Living Museum of the West as a testing site, to propose new way of presenting their archive collection, providing flexible interactive spaces for visitors and co-working spaces for the museum staff. [Re]petition recognizes interior conditions on a durational timeline that unfold the past and present condition to speculate possible futures.
[Re]petition takes three different approaches to different histories of the site. Acknowledging the First Nations culture, the Marin Balluk, part of the Wurunjeri people, members of the Kulin nations drawing their close relationship with the environment, to tell the stories of the past frame a relationship with the land through a de-colonized approach to interior design. [Re]petition strives to bring outside-in to weaken the boundary of interior and exterior reflecting pre-colonial experiences of living with country. In doing this, the design secondly dilutes the industrial near-past of the site, developing ways to bring changes in interior experience as a living history that unfolds though participation.
Finally, the project also challenges us to see the present program of the archive/museum as not just as preserving objects and stories in the past to maintain in stillness but allowing them to ‘grow’ with participants, and unfold in the spaces themselves growing narratives that impact the present.
[Re]petition is driven by an interest in duration within interior experiences through everyday repetitive activities and actions. [Re]petition underpins theory from Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition of the new is produced from every difference in repetition. [1] Through research and exploration [Re]petitive investigates what is ‘the new’ in the process of repeating, and what are the traces of actions that emerges when encountering space. [Re]petition proposes that interior conditions be able to facilitate built-in-change responding to on-going everyday experiences.
[1] “the new...is produced from the very matter of the world...[with] repetition, but with difference.” – Simon O'Sullivan and Stephe Zepke, Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New.