This will take a lot out of me. But it has to be said. My dyslexia is my third disability. I used to think I was lazy; my reading and writing could improve if only I applied myself. But I found it all so hard. Mum would say you need to learn to read because […]

When we first talked about doing this issue together, care was thrown out as a theme early on. It stuck. It connected in multiple ways with our individual areas of research, practice, politics, and with our living. People had a lot to say. We were sending edits back and forth with writers when news of […]

This must be the taste of Language — the tongue mapped by many colours, parsed by the vowels of memory, the roof of the mouth the dome of a world circumscribed by consonants, whose edges suggest the sour-sweetness of oranges, the bittermelon’s green rind, the river- scent of mangoes all the way to the grove. […]

Terracotta Wood Tower (2020) – These ceramic objects were made by my daughter Hana and I at our dining table. I learned to use clay while staying with my grandma on school holidays. I remember the brick kiln she built in her backyard and the drama of a smoky raku firing. A very serious Grandma […]

Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance. —John Berger Compared to humans, other animals seem quite reasonable. —Claude Cahun As I write, Clare and her son Morten, or ‘Greenface Group’, are drawing a chicken watching a spider eating a cockroach; a war of magic between a lizard and […]

My Grandma Hanna made the wallet I carry with me every day. It’s tanned caribou hide, trimmed with small green and white glass beads, a perfect five-petal flower — dark green, iridescent orange, with a light-pink centre. It’s sitting next to me as I write this from Lenapeyok homeland, Lenapehoking. I carry my grandma’s gorgeous […]

PREAMBLE This text is a treatment for an audio essay, a study in be-holding Sans II (1968), a sculptural work by Eva Hesse in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). To be-hold, as I have written elsewhere, reclaims the etymological root of ‘beholding’, before the term’s co-option as ocular observance. […]

three caravans out the back fridge under the house floodwater been coming up two bedroom fibro boat tied to the side five kids moving all their stuff up a big boiler for washing caravans going somewhere else sans occupants and there were a dozen occupants the days before climate catastrophe was a well-worn concept we […]

1. ‘How do we reconnect with the gestural origins of language?’ asks Jackie Wang. I wanted to write about the failure of language and I wanted to write about how the failure of language is an enduring matter of culture, an enduring matter of the project of poetics. The process of writing can be quite […]

The Debris Facility Pty Ltd is aqueer corporate entity enacting parasitism through im material projects ofadministration, installation, performance, video, wearables, text and dis/embodiment among other activities. Utilising non-binary approaches, they disrupt linear systems of exchange, scales of agency and visual and speculative economies.

Twenty First Century Naked Apes: Handaxes and the Genesis of the Mental World I wake up and do my compulsive morning scroll: an activist friend’s picture of stolen land; a witty defeatist environmental meme; dazzling selfie after selfie with unrelated captions. One of them is mine. A new club night! Fucking hell. It’s nearly 2020, […]

UCLA. Broad Art Centre. Classroom 2122. Great Expectations. A bildungsroman novel by Charles Dickens. The narrator: Pip. A retrospective narrator for a recursive structure. Recounting, with hindsight, the story of the young boy he once was. Two Pips per page, often more. For instance: older Pip remembering younger Pip thinking about his future. Identity formation […]

It occurs to me that the bookended timeline proposed between issues 13.1 and 13.2 of un Magazine – from the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 (the historic location around which issue 13.1 was built), to the introduction of the ‘Melbourne Model’ in 2008 (the focus for 13.2) and beyond to our current conditions […]

Australian White Ibises are better known as bin chickens to most Sydney-siders. The nickname derives from the species reliance on rubbish and public bins to sustain themselves. Ibises are naturally inclined towards a diet of insects and molluscs, but with the loss of their wetland habitats to climate change and land redevelopments, they have been […]

We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. We surround democracy’s false image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, we’re undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, we’re unwilling. Every time it tries to take […]

Serene Velocity in Practice: MC510/ CS183* (2017-19) imagines two classrooms, each based on a real course taught by adjunct lecturers in United States’ tertiary education institutions. Evangelical pastor John Wimber taught ‘MC510: Signs and Wonders’ in the School of World Mission and Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary between 1982 and 1986. Silicon Valley entrepreneur […]

The following text is developed from a body of research originally produced as part of The Combative Phase, an exhibition of films and documents and a series of programs held at Yale Union (Portland, US) in 2017. Left to themselves, large communities do a dreadful job of communicating internally. Ghettoes, whether in Bel Air or […]

The words below form multiple threads of preliminary thoughts shared between Joel Sherwood-Spring and Carol Que from December 2018 to August 2019. Both young academics tenuously located between the institution and their creative and political work ‘outside’, the conversation here spans lands, architectures, gentrification, and education. Joel’s words are indented and Carol’s are left aligned.[^1] […]

Artlaab was a University of Western Australia (UWA) School of Design student-run gallery in the Nedlands Masonic Hall. For many of us, Artlaab was the site of early experiments in curation, installation, studio practice and performance. As a past facilitator of Artlaab, I have written this essay to question how its institutional conditions led to […]

Who said it? is a tweeted intervention drawing attention to how the language of the contemporary University is little different to the language of corporate marketing. Pivoting off the imperative that the University must ‘take its place’ in a marketised world, I tweet copy from University promotional material alongside that of merchant banks, real estate […]

Kym Maxwell is an artist and educator residing in the Kulin Nation of Naarm (Melbourne).

The previous issue of un Magazine observed the reinforcement of external borders following Nine Eleven. Here, our attention turns towards the collapsing logics of internal categories and departmental demarcations. We trace this line of enquiry within the context of The University of Melbourne and the introduction of ‘The Melbourne Model.’ We’re working with the understanding […]

This document addresses the relationship between Australian Indigenous Studies (AIS) andThe University of Melbourne. The way The University of Melbourne exerts power over marginalised communities, and their epistemologies, will be familiar to anyone who has gone through similar treatment in the academy. It is exerted through physical and disciplinary fragmentation of offices and departments, through […]

Samoa House Library was created in response to The University of Auckland’s decision to close three specialist libraries: Fine Arts, Music and Dance, Architecture and Urban Planning. As members of ‘Save the Fine Arts Library’ campaign, we organised to raise public awareness of the decision and to halt the closures. While our campaign was successful […]