Family, ancestry, sexuality and class origins are inheritances we never asked for, but contend with every day. Under queer stars in the mid-year Mercury retrograde, face-to-face on lockdown screens, we explored our stories and skies together.
The dialectics of opposing places and signs play out in the tug of who we wish to be & how we came to be. Ella Crowley’s Too close to touch is a poetic memoir about attending her Nanna’s funeral during Taurus Season 2020, under the Scorpio full moon when the pandemic first struck. In A spectral appetite, Jill Pope contemplates the inheritance of abundant dark hair and the same Gemini-Sagittarius placements as her ever absent-present refugee father.
Clarity & ambiguity call & respond throughout longing’s shadowy halls in this new poem by Josephine Mead. The state of home after loss & the creepiness of love poems are themes in Jordana Bragg’s How to write a haunted house. The winter solstice in the never-winter southern hemisphere, and dwelling within the moon’s rhythms instead of the sun’s, take centre stage in Jessica Kejun Xu’s video-poem dongzhi swirlings.
Under queer stars that outlive the smallness of our sorrows, may Mercury forever keep you on your toes. – Angelita Biscotti
the moon looms Too close to touch by Ella Crowley grain by grain That I snuck onto the page … by Josephine Mead The traces that connect A spectral appetite by Jill Pope Become a memory detective How to write a haunted house by Jo Bragg to know ourselves differently in the longest moonlight dongzhi swirlings by Jessica Kejun Xu
That not-puritanical purity // Mercury-ruled Virgo // the ordinariness of culture // a farewell by Angelita Biscotti more
Multiplicity and the Sun by Angelita Biscotti more
Where Mercury finds you by Angelita Biscotti more
Taurus horoscope by Resident Astrologer and Fantasy Worker Angelita Biscotti more
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Study always exceeds a term or a book or an essay; study is life and for life and takes a lifetime. We return again and again to the site of study and believe the promise it makes us. There’s almost nothing like it, except love, which is study for and of the other. This workshop takes its name, and its desire, from Ashon T Crawley’s notion of ‘otherwise possibilities’: that which ‘announces the fact of infinite alternatives to what is’.
We gather over Zoom at a time when our overlapping and interlocking crises are more apparent than ever: we are living through the devastation of a global pandemic and its attendant crises, among which the already existing and long-term inequalities, injustices, and immiserations are both amplified and intensified; we are living in an extended moment of climate collapse and the obliteration of a liveable planet as the result of a few hundred years of carbon capitalism; and we here in Australia are taking what is likely a momentary breath from a new seasonal norm of catastrophic bushfires. Amongst it all, the streets are ablaze with calls for abolition, and the hope of a new world, a world in common and able to sustain us in a life worth living, is starting to become clearer in terms of a set of tangible things: destroy what is here, build new social infrastructures, and learn from struggles won and lost.
Critical art writing is tasked with finding a way to both articulate how and why art comes to mean in a specific time and place but also how art can be part of the experiment in how to orient meaning elsewhere – that is, how to imagine a different world. Art’s madeness makes it apt for such an experiment: we can remake or unmake what is made. – Astrid Lorange evolving from celestial navigation To The Underside of Ships and Maps by Therese Keogh the plasticity of our brain In the direction of a hum by Olga Bennett the rhythm, the lyric, the call, or the feeling that moves us by June Miskell slipped off axis A Year, Reflected by Josephine Mead sometimes it jolts Seven Sines by Rebecca Harkins-Cross to stand against unrealistic optimism In Sickness and in Health by Jordana Bragg like a cave, or maybe a seafloor Gathering: A short text on inter-reliant and vulnerable ways of making and being with one another by Naomi Segal R U OK? Day campaign Smart work by Audrey Pfister meaning arriving from proximity in like two pears by Rachel Schenberg
Horoscope for the New Moon in Aries by Resident Astrologer and Fantasy Worker Angelita Biscotti
“You can’t fool culture. You can’t fool people. They can sense when it’s not authentic.” – Moe Shalizi, Sun in Aries more
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For First Nations People the personal is political and the political is personal. This rich and diverse selection of poems from ten First Nations poets germinated, grew and blossomed from a series of impassioned discussions and writing activities facilitated through online workshops during the height of Victoria’s second COVID lockdown. The workshops were presented in partnership with BLINDSIDE. – Jeanine Leane without needing to touch the gun / unprecedented times / 2020 by Jazz Money another colourful history Untitled by Dale Collier three million, nine hundred and thirty-six thousand metres limbo by Tace Stevens for the not you, for the not wealthy, for the not true blue The Audacity by Beau SYW captured in glistening immaculate plastic Gurudhaany – Goanna by Elijah Money help raise our vibration Flower Power by Jenny Fraser Aunty says, with a gentle nod, that’s where our ancestors are Underneath Darwin Casino Lies A Larrakia Burial Ground by Laniyuk Eyes contort to the past Grown Up by Elia Harding only the English poison My Nana by Rebeka Morrison The newspaper (still keeping score) Bran Nue Dae by Declan Fry
Break-ups, retroshade & fish: Pisces Season meditations by Resident Astrologer and Fantasy Worker Angelita Biscotti
I looked into his eyes
Which were far larger than mine
… They shifted a little, but not
To return my stare.
–It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
– Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish
The stellium is breaking up. more
Aquarius Season Horoscopes by Resident Astrologer and Fantasy Worker Angelita Biscotti
20th Jan: The sun moves into Aquarius at 11.00am on 20th Jan 2021, with Mercury, Saturn & Jupiter still in this sign. A good time for revolutions – loud in the world, or in the privacy of one’s conscience – revolutions with enduring impact. A potent moment for shedding the beliefs that keep you stuck. Remember that big changes only stick when the commitments to higher values manifest in everyday routines. An extraordinary life is the sum of extraordinary days. more
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move move move move move and when that has been done, start all over again. the second time over is a re-write. neck open, eyes forward, watch a passing cloud silhouette one thing and then, another. we like to do things in cycles. read read read read and when that has been done, start all over again. the onslaught of quietude sounds like nothing. you can only see it coming. silhouetting one thing as it nears, docking as another. – Lujayn Hourani a hole in the heel of your sock by Lujayn Hourani like a disobedient dog Gates of Heaven by Panda Wong hope wines hope dines Hope 2.0 by Angela Glindemann and looking at divorce rates lately To the Unknown Splendour of Being by Jordana Bragg as the world collapses concave now winter by Rae White the tired fight the corona spite Exhausted from Zeal by Kym Maxwell let moon shine in TV Poem by Hassan Abul misery dream Salmonella Orange DIY Meaning by Isobel Milne_Miso Bell
December horoscope by Resident Astrologer and Fantasy Worker Angelita Biscotti
The sun is in fiery, journey-seeking Sagittarius after a year of forced interiority. Mercury moves into Sagittarius on the 2nd of December, enchanting the sun with its curiosity, capriciousness, and communication savvy. Venus, ruler of pleasure and affection, remains in the confronting depths of Scorpio until it moves into Sagittarius on the 16th. Mars, the planet of courage, erotic passion, ambition and risk-taking, is strong in Aries, and remains secure in its power for the month. The fast-moving, high-impact personal planets are on fire this Sagittarius season. more
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Reenactment is often spoken of as a revisiting of history to understand the past through the present. But within contemporary art sometimes reenactment is an aim, sometimes a tool, and sometimes an element within a larger work. Reperformance is proposed as a framework – as a way of approaching the creation of art that looks to use or respond to histories, archives, and other source materials. The works developed and presented were works in progress. Working in this way takes time. Time to unpack and repack, but also to give thought to ethical considerations. All of these works were smaller components to larger research and studio based projects; works within themselves, but also gestures towards broader ideas. – Excerpt from Camila Galaz’ Introduction to Time, After Time
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birds, they have two heads sometimes. the two-headed bird sings two songs, one for the dream in which blue flowers bloom from fork tongues of snakes, one for the spirit who can only be seen with the mind, not the eyes. the writer must perform between the dream world and the material world, the space where gods, demons and spirits dwell, the space of unreal deformations and unplanned compositions, the space where surreal things are made. each writer travelled through the unconscious realm and pulled out a motif; practised dream association; undertook automatic writing with burning flames, mirrors and instruments and performed the symbolic slaying of ‘author as god’. these texts were born in a dream. – Manisha Anjali the second contains a hiss the visitor returns. the second contains a hiss my architecture is slipping bodies baking in fires dressed in tišina, wearing selfishness like a pageant sash, sjajna you opened your hand not realising it was connected to your eye feline gold tooth crush i dream of dadi’s paan daan what the stone said rune of ruins grief scapes you are facing an invisible audience the procession moves forth performed before dawn the lifecycle of a perceived nonentity do you know i was born with a tail? ¿bashtak kheshtak-e tou ra gereft-e? it aches in strange rhythms saviiour a plastic disgrace, a fizzing lush bath bomb finding myself neck-deep in the butthole of my subconscious an existential sext bleaching piss?
