In Octavia Butler’s science-fiction novel Parable of the Sower a character remarks: ‘There has to be more that we can do, a better destiny that we can shape. Another place. Another way. Something!’[^1] This plea is rooted in a near-future dystopian Los Angeles, an irritating and disfigured city that has been destroyed by climate change […]

It is not kind to laugh at other people’s art. Seated on a grass lawn a few blocks away from Fringe Festival’s new home in Trades Hall, the three of us shared a moment of comedy thinking about the radical potentialities which might emerge as moustache twiddlers collide with staunch trade union militants. Connecting the […]

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 […]

I was sprinting when I first heard Hannah Weiner’s voice. I’d developed a habit of running along the Merri Creek and, instead of listening to music, I would listen to audio recordings of poets reading and talking. I’d picked the recording almost at random from the PennSound archive, having never read her work before. It […]

Under a white London sky in October 2019, I entered the deep red interior of Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann’s exhibition Army of Love at Auto Italia South East. Two wall- wide films were playing in conjoined spaces. The first, Army of Love (2016), is a kind of documentary-campaign for the larger Army of Love, […]

A shift towards advocating for full representation within the arts sector has encouraged an increase in programming across artist-run and institutional spaces that supports and prioritises culturally diverse artists. However, there is still a need to address the underrepresentation of curators from a variety of backgrounds employed within these cultural organisations. If the curator’s etymological […]

This essay narrates the direction of contemporary art practices in post-1998 Indonesia through a discussion about care, viability of artists’ projects — using Parasite Lottery, Gudskul and Serikat Sindikasi as case studies — and the sustainability of cultural ecosystems. It provides historical accounts of how these initiatives emerged in contemporary Indonesia, and the ways that […]

do you need some hope? a friend told me I need a taser. fear and violence. I felt no one would talk to me. having no one to share your achievements with everytime that you create a new world. I’m sorry I care about you. I’m afraid to ask for more of your time. I […]

To walk through the main roads, small alleys, places or neighbourhoods that a mass protest has touched is to negotiate tilted grounds. What used to be the flatness of the everyday — double-deckers’ squeaky engines, fences and traffic lights managing anonymous bodies, endless lines of advertisements — now acquires a different shape. Protest sites of […]

A woman in light blue jeans kneels over a sex doll. Its synthetic, rubbery legs are splayed across a bed as she casually probes its mouth with her fingers. A moment later she fields an enquiry on a cordless phone. ‘We usually go by appointments,’ she politely states in German, as she adjusts the doll’s […]

Unknown barely survived a massacre that decimated her people. Sometime around the mid-1800s, hidden beneath shrub, she watched as vicious intruders collected her clan’s lives, one by one, until no soul stood. As silence fell, she travelled through grass picking up her feet faster and faster, until she hit a heavy speed, fast enough to […]

We move together, with no body left behind —Sins Invalid When you’re non-disabled, a comfortable place to sit down is not something that you spend much time worrying about. You probably wouldn’t even think about it until you needed it and it wasn’t there. Living with my disabilities (which include arthritis), a place to sit […]