When Georgia Nowak and Eugene Perepletchikov conceived their short film, Aurum, for Melbourne Design Week, they weren't thinking about awards. Their goal was to explore society’s complex relationship with gold through the ages – namely how much we rely on it, and how much it has shaped modern life in Victoria.

But their creative response to the Melbourne Design Week theme ‘How does design shape life?’ resonated with NGV curators Timothy Moore, Ewan McEoin and Simone LeAmon – and they have been named the winners of the 2020 Melbourne Design Week Award.

“We feel really grateful that the National Gallery has acknowledged not only our work, but also the fact that the arts is a really valuable component of storytelling, and that we’re dealing with globally important conversations,” says Nowak, in response to the win. “We’re honoured to be a part of that.”

The start of a creative partnership

Nowak, an architect by trade, first approached director and cinematographer Perepletchikov last year about a potential collaboration project.

Nowak had been working as an architect for over a decade, and was fascinated by some of the larger conversations that were coming up in her work. "When you’re working in practice, you’re often dealing with broader issues associated with the architecture that you’re working on,” she says. “For example, you have to consider things from a conceptual point of view to fit in with city planning, and you often work on sites with contested histories. There are always these conversions that come up in terms of what it means to build structure and what it means to build in a particular landscape.”

After going into teaching at Monash University, where she had the space and resources to indulge her passion for these areas, Nowak started to consider other ways that she could investigate these issues.

“I found that some of the research I was doing didn’t necessarily need to live in the written word, so it became about how that research could be visualised in a different format, like video, sculpture and photography.”

“That’s where Eugene and I started,” she says. “The initial project we worked on was a critique of an issue in the architecture industry – the dissociation between the extraction of a material and its use. As an architect, you sit behind a desk and order materials without necessarily understanding their full life cycles.”