Monument to the Overheard

design + writing Letterbox | client City of Stonnington | fabrication Derek Chandler | location Mount Street, Prahran, Melbourne

Monument to the Overheard offers fragments of real conversations overheard at the Prahran Market in 2023. The result is a site-specific solid steel typographic installation, monumentalising these tiny snippets of incidental, everyday discussions.

From phrases of motherly comfort to her daughter (Blink and it might just go away…), a discussion of beauty treatments (my agreed brow colour…) or a comment on the pandemic (foggy families of…), this work focusses on these puzzling slices of ‘chit-chat’, that cultural marginalia that eludes formal historical record.