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UPSTARTUPSTART is a mobile platform, embodying both physical and intangible elements which aims to establish a system for sharing ideas and projects beyond the fixed scheduling of Melbourne Design Week. 

The structure operates as a parasite, fostering dialogues, debates, and discussions and thriving on the organised schedule and audience of the Design Festival. For the duration of the event, UPSTART will be occupied by graduate and early career designers shifting the spotlight to unconventional design that defies conventional criteria for support.

The project serves multiple purposes, foremost among them being the provision of an opportunity for recent graduates, students, or individuals outside formal design channels to discuss their work. Equally significant is its role in fostering dialogues, debates, and discussions. Consequently, it becomes a lens offering a perspective on the vibrant new generation, poised to shape a novel world or, at the very least, address the challenges of our current one.

Organised by
Alessandro Mason (Gisto)
Warren Taylor 		Video-urlMaxim Boutin-Reeve, Naish Dare, Naomi Dodd, Aiko Jasmine, Dean Gerszonovicz, Phoebe Hwong, Shu Loke, Sean McKenna, Chloe Parkinson, Grace RobsonI know it’s a bit strange but it’s the truth. This whole project grew out of a discussion between Warren and I about design and fungi.

My fascination with the great world of fungi stems from multiple sources, which I try to summarize below. At an early stage in life my curiosity about this world focused above all on their mystery, their magic. My aunt Gina lives in a hilly village in the Venetian foothills of the Alps and she often spoke of mushrooms, they were almost always at the table and from an early age I would hear stories of people going into a forest and coming back with basktets full of mushrooms. They talked about secret places they couldn’t reveal, they talked about very rich expeditions and unsuccessful expeditions, a bit like deep sea fishing I guess, or maybe like hunting, what fascinated me was the mixture of knowledge, study and luck, this gave these expeditions an archaic, pre-industrial charm.

My second source of inspiration is John Cage, whom I studied obsessively during my university studies, following step by step his parabolas and pirouettes that combined poetry and experimentation, amidst a piano modified with screws and various paraphernalia, silences and New York traffic noises, mushrooms appear played through a series of microphones and other devices unknown to me. This exploration and his tales of mushrooms brought me even closer to this magical world and the world of electronic music.

The third source was a fantastic surprise, a book entitled Entangled Life by the British researcher Merlin Sheldrake, a mine of information and insights for those fascinated by fungi. There I learnt many things about their form, their method of diffusion and proliferation. I learnt that fungi are perhaps the most sustainable materials in the world because under certain conditions they double their volume every day. I discovered about their multicentric structure and their fantastic and infallible root system, the thing that fascinated me most then is their being in a world in between, not animal, not plant but in symbiosis with both, a very complex and articulated world made up of many forms and structures that are sometimes difficult to define and classify.

Alessandro Mason, May 2024
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