Transforming the port city into a hub of creativity and innovation, Fremantle Design Week is set to return from October 18 to 25, 2024.

The week-long, walkable festival will celebrate design in all its forms with an extensive and engaging program of over 50 design-inspired events including conversations, tours, workshops, films, and open studios.

Themed ‘transition’, the program will inspire, entertain and challenge audiences, whilst asking them to consider – in challenging times – how we rethink our world to design a healthy, positive future.

A space odyssey: 40 years of spaceagency

Fremantle architecture firm spaceagency is one of Australia’s most acclaimed design practices. Founded forty years ago, spaceagency’s highly awarded portfolio of residential, hospitality and commercial projects has led the way on adaptive reuse and heritage interpretation and changed the face of hospitality design in the West.

Come on a design journey with principals Michael Patroni and Dimmity Walker as they reflect on four decades of creating beautiful buildings and interiors.

In celebration of its 40-year milestone, spaceagency has commissioned a short film to be screened at the event, shot at locations designed by the practice over several decades. The film uses storytelling to reveal how spaces take on a secret life of their own beyond the reach of the designers.

Planetary Imaginaries & Planetary Transition

In a WA first, audiences will be invited to explore the radical possibilities of global unity on climate action in the exhibition Planetary Transition by LA- based filmmaker and speculative architect, Liam Young. Described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’, Liam’s multi-sensory and provocative films sit in the space between design and fiction.

Liam’s live storytelling performance ‘Planetary Imaginaries’ will take audiences on a sci-fi safari through a screen-scape of alternative and hopeful worlds that slip between fiction and documentary, inviting reflection on our own role in the fu

Liam Young’s Fremantle Design Week keynote presentations are not to be missed.

Planetary Imaginaries: Following centuries of colonisation, globalisation, and never-ending economic extraction, we have remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. The dystopias of science fiction that previously read as speculative cautionary tales are now the stage sets of the every day as many of us live out our lives in a disaster film playing in real-time. In this seemingly futureless moment, the storytelling performance Planetary Imaginaries will take us on a sci-fi safari through a screenscape of alternative and hopeful worlds. Slipping between fiction and documentary, the journey will be both an extraordinary image of tomorrow and an urgent illumination of the environmental questions that are facing us today.

Planetary Transition: How might the world look if the entire planet united to radically transition in the face of the climate crisis? Fremantle Design Week is proud to bring the evocative video works of Liam Young to Perth audiences for the first time.Planet City and The Great Endeavor speculate on the impact of the Anthropocene at scale and where it might lead. Reassembling the familiar into unfamiliar worlds, these entrancing multi-sensory journeys are provocations that prompt us to think about our place and responsibilities within a vast yet finite ecosystem.

Planet City

Planet City explores the productive potential of extreme densification, where the entire population of the earth retreats into one hyper-dense metropolis and surrenders the rest of the planet to a global wilderness.

In Planet City we see that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

The Great Endeavour

In order to reach current climate targets, we cannot rely solely on slashing future emissions. The Great Endeavour visualises the construction of the largest engineering project in human history, designed to remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground at gigatonne scales.

Featuring workwear created in collaboration with Hollywood costume designer Ane Crabtree and set to the score of a new planetary workers’ song composed by vocalist Lyra Pramuk, the film celebrates a new technological sublime, chronicling the coordinated action to decolonise the atmosphere in our last great act of planetary transformation.

‘The Nature of Transition / Lightly

A group exhibition at the Naval Store, curated by Lightly and collectively titled The Nature of Transition, explores the connections between objects and people, one made possible through thoughtful design. Lightly’s captivating group installation showcases a limited collection of new works from Cindy-Lee Davies and Artedomus, designers like Remington Matters, Georgia Bisley, Aileen Corbett and Emma Lindegaard, and the evocative work of artists Jordy Hewitt and Waldemar Kolbusz, inviting visitors to experience art and design in a profoundly personal way.

Featuring as part of The Nature of Transition – proud Noongar man and emerging artist Daryl Dempster has collaborated with Lightly on a collection of larger canvases, symbolising his growth and newfound confidence in occupying space and colour. Dempster will also host a children’s workshop, exploring found objects and the bold use of colour.

Celebrate the connections fostered between objects, people and the spirited presence of lived environments; one made possible through thoughtful design.

The intangible and inexplicable ‘energy’ of human spaces will be highlighted through a carefully curated experience grounded by a limited collection of works by designer Cindy-Lee Davies and a selection of local designers and artists in the beautiful Fremantle Naval Store.

The exhibition will highlight that through intention, creativity and community, there is a remarkable ‘thread’ of human connection with a precious, often unspeakable, significance.

The Nature of Transition is a testament to the enduring power of design, community, story and craftsmanship to foster connection, prompt reflection and enrich the human experience for the future.

Exhibitors include:

Artedomus
Darryl Dempster
Emma Lindegaard Studio
Jordy Hewitt
Kolbusz Space – Georgia Bisley, Aileen Corbett, Mal Harry, Waldemar Kolbusz, Benjamin Kontoullas & Kartika Laili Ahmad
Remington Matters

Gradient

Hosted at Shacks Gallery, Gradient is an exhibition of commissioned furniture by some of Western Australia’s most innovative designers and makers including Olive Gill-Hille and Jack Flanagan. This showcase explores the theme of change, blurring the lines between utility and art, tradition and modernity, and past and future.

Gradient invites a group of WA furniture designer/makers to showcase their perspective on change; between utility and art, the traditional and contemporary, the past and the future. The exhibition is a call to contemplate the roles that the objects we produce play in the lives of consumers, and how transitions in design, materials and concepts mirror ongoing shifts in society.

Designers must be reactive to an ever-shifting landscape of local and global manufacturing. The recent native timber logging ban, alongside the increasing cost of imported raw materials, leaves WA designers with their own set of conditions to navigate. In response, they craft new narratives and ways to work, also mindful of issues such as over-consumption and sustainability.

Gradient encourages us to see furniture not just as objects of use, but as active participants in the narrative of change, reflecting back at us our own adaptability, identity, and endless capacity for reinvention.

Participating designers:

Alex Malkovic
Disordinary
Duzi Objects
Fosax
Jack Flanagan
Kartika Laili Ahmad
Manner
Marshall Wood
Objects of Agency
Olive Gill-Hille
Pivello Terrazzo
Studio Honour

Curator: Mark Lilly / Manner

For more information: times, tickets and locations: Fremantle Design Week