A collaboration with Melbourne Design Week to bring new project collaborators Stephanie Macdonald from London-based 6a architects and Sofia von Ellrichshausen from Chilean art and architecture studio Pezo von Ellrichshausen to Australia as part Melbourne Design Week. Melbourne Design Week is an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria, running from 15 to 25 March, 2018.

The Monster Salon and Dining rooms at Hotel Hotel were a reinterpretation of the suburban family rooms of immigrants in Australia post WWII. It was a domestic place. At once a parlour for receiving guests, for talking art and politics, a living room for lolling around by the fire with friends, a place for listening to music, and a room for sharing meals. At times, we gathered old and new friends here to exchange ideas and we host conversations, poetry readings and performances. Fittingly, we often shared stories about immigration, about how immigration increases the textures and layers of a place’s cultural fabric. These are important stories. Especially in a time when the number of people displaced by conflict is at its highest since the aftermath of WWII.

The Nishi Gallery is a cultural space in Canberra, Australia. It explores human experience through the lens of local identity, objects and their meaning; the natural and built world; design experimentation and artisanal making. Our exhibitions program supports the subversive, the radical and the vernacular. Nishi Gallery is curated by Molonglo and made in collaboration with local, national and international artists and designers, creative and social enterprises, cultural organisations and independent curators via a submissions and commissions process.

For us, architecture is perpetually unfinished, defined by the people who use it rather than by the people who created it. So that is why from time to time we changed our library at Hotel Hotel into a shop. A few times a year we asked friends who run shops that we like to come in and take over the library, transforming it to a one-day shop.

‘The Other Moderns' is a 300-page book of stories about little-known émigré architects, interior designers and furniture makers who fled Europe in World War II and began working in Sydney in the 1930s. ‘The Other Moderns’ is co-published by Molonglo, Hotel Hotel and NewSouth Publishing; and edited by Rebecca Hawcroft.

You can buy thousands of units of something from somewhere in the world. This is necessary to an extent for today’s populations. But still, we are anxious. Who made those thousand units? Did we really need to order that many? And what do these things even mean to us when we don’t really know anything about them? Fix and Make is a series of workshops and talks that explores these anxieties. Through the practical, the experimental and the philosophical the program brought different people together to actively questions our relationship with and consumption of objects. Fix and Make invited individuals to reconnect with their hands. It encouraged new learning through doing. Through the process of fixing and making we reckon we can gain a better understanding of how things work and apply this knowledge to other areas of life: to solve our own problems; to take control of our own resources; to break our dependence on manufacturers who create products with built-in obsolescence. The annual program,running throughout 2016, brought together more than 60 collaborators to lead workshops and contribute to discussions from fields as diverse as neuroscience, art, design and craft, food, education, music, psychology and the environment.

We are interested in people. Being interested in people means we are also interested in the objects people make and use. Throughout the ground floor of Hotel Hotel we had several glass cabinets that we used as small exhibition spaces. They were curated by invited curators, artists and designers. The cabinets were a study of human and natural life – artefacts that document our existence and tell a story about who ‘we’ are and what is important to us.

Anthropologically speaking, rituals connect us to a culture, a sub-culture, maybe even a cult. We have always been curious observers of the repetitive and sometimes strange routines people practise in private. This fascination with human behaviour is the catalyst for a creative project and ongoing study of all the weird and wonderful rituals people do every day. For the project we have created a series of short films directed by U-P and Alyssa McClelland that re-enact the bizarre rituals of others inside the rooms of Hotel Hotel. We’ve also written articles, catalogued everyday rituals across cultures, studied tools and implements connected to rituals and have invited photographers to document their own rituals.

Cooking. It's a universal language. Our recipes project brought together new ideas coming out of the Monster kitchen and bar. We also ran workshops where people learnt how to make new things.

‘Brutti ma Buoni’ comprised of two works. A short film by U-P and Coco & Maximilian featuring Brutalist buildings and an accompanying sound piece by Speak Percussion. Together they work to observe and orchestrally arrange Brutalism. What can we see when we really look at these monolithic structures in detail? What do their rough textures, shadows and unadorned geometries reveal? What might these beasts sound like? Cavernous and vast? Drone-like? Repetitive? Hypnotic? Oppressive, optimistic or sublime?

Repairing. It’s something our grandparents definitely did, but something we are doing less and less. In today’s society repaired objects are often perceived as being of less value. Object Therapy was a project that challenged this preconception, celebrating repair as a creative process that can add value. Object Therapy was a research and making project that culminated in a public exhibition that encouraged us to rethink our consumption patterns and re-evaluate the broken objects that surround us. It explored the almost forgotten role of repair in our society and its possibilities. The project was developed in collaboration with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Australian National University (ANU) and through a research-based approach it was an investigation into the culture of ‘transformative’ repair as practiced by local, interstate and international artists and designers.

Some people say there are some things that you should never talk about over dinner. We don’t say that. This project brought people together to talk about things we might not ordinarily discuss.

'Favourite Buildings' is an ongoing research project that compiles our favourite buildings out there in the world. There is a definite bent towards brutalist architecture, modernist architecture and vernacular architecture. We're not quite sure where this will go but we're hoarders at heart so we'll keep collecting. One day it will make sense.