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 […]

Whenever we establish our spaces, specifically for us, those spaces are inherently seen as threats.[^1] Joseph Cullier, cofounder of The Black School In his address to the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Awards Dinner for the University of Auckland, Fijian Pākehā artist Luke Willis Thompson described receiving his first undergraduate scholarship as ‘a moment of mobility … […]

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).