MTalks: Wish you were here - Shifting the tourist gaze toward the local

MTalks is series of talks held and hosted by MPavillion throughout the summer and autumn months in Melbourne.

MPavilion is Australia’s leading architecture commission - a cultural laboratory where the community can come together to engage and share.

Set within the Queen Victoria Gardens, MPavilion has become the focus of a free program season of cultural events and interventions, lively talks, performances, workshops, installations and kid-friendly experiences.

MTalks are recorded and archived as podcasts. 

Wish You Were Here: Shifting The Tourist Gaze Toward The Local

The Maldives is synonymous with luxury holidays: the ultimate “Robinson Crusoe” island escape where you can be treated like royalty and step out of your busy lives.

Over the span of 50 years, Maldivian tourism developed from humble beginnings to a place that now welcomes over one million tourists per year (almost double the country’s population), and the number of resorts is reaching close to the number of inhabited islands.

However, obscured from tourists' eyes are complex realities of a population of people grappling with the impact of rapid development, situated at the forefront of the biggest climate calamity facing human existence.

Two Maldivian artists, one living in Melbourne, one in the Maldives, talk about their connection to the Maldives, and how their art practices have become a medium of telling their stories about what it means to live in and belong to, a place that is so romanticised in the global consciousness.

This conversation is facilitated by Helen Runting.