Free Association is a platform for workshops, public programming and publishing through the expanded fields of fiction, poetry, critical theory, philosophy, art and art criticism.

TEAM

Founder, Programming and Development: Anita Spooner
Designer: Alex Margetic
Web developer: Xavier Connelly
Previous Team: Chantelle Mitchell, Jordana Bragg, Josephine Mead, Angelita Biscotti – thank you!

CONTACT

hello@freeassociation.com.au

We acknowledge the custodians of the land on which we work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pay respect to their Elders, past, present and emerging.

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An image of the moon connected to a telephone with a pink background

Family, ancestry, sexuality and class origins are complex inheritances we didn’t ask for. How might we reappropriate the concept of destiny to land fully in our bodies and selves, as creatures of stardust thrown into consciousness and time?

 

Under Queer Stars introduces Angelita Biscotti’s queer anti-capitalist engagement with birth chart astrology, embracing humour and hope to consider how we might speak to ourselves about ourselves with compassion and curiosity.

This workshop will consider the counselling, research, and teaching praxis of queer BIPOC healers in the Pluto in Scorpio and Sagittarius generations, alongside theory and method inspired by Hellenistic and psychological astrology. Participants will study astrology of love, sex, and queer relating as well as astrology of family and ancestry. We will read and discuss emerging classics, such as the work of Alice Sparkly Kat,Tabitha Prado-Richardson and others, as we work through the natal promise of our birth charts.

Participants are invited to use their findings as prompts for poetry, prose or visual art in response to their charts, to be considered for publication on Free Association’s website. These creations will also be developed for Rogue Planet, a night of readings and performance under the stars, forthcoming in summer 2021.

Supported by Siteworks and Moreland City Council Making Space Program.

Working on unceded Boon Wurrung Country, Angelita Biscotti is a non-binary feminine astrologer, writer, artist and teacher of Spanish-Filipinx descent. Her client practice and astrological writing is inspired by Hellenistic, psychological, and evolutionary astrology approaches. She has been published in Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, Archer, Djed Press, Peril, ABC Life, The Lifted Brow, Critical Military Studies, and elsewhere. Her previous teaching experience includes an erotic poetry workshop at Writers Victoria in 2021 and sessional academic teaching at La Trobe University and the Ateneo de Manila University. She is the current recipient of a scholarship and mentorship with the international Association for Astrological Networking (AFAN). Her chart is dominated by the fire sign Leo, ruled by an 8th house Earth sun.

The themes of her work are unconventional intimacies, anti-racist beauty ideals, and queer hope. She is most accessible through her website and Instagram @angelita.biscotti

Intrusive thoughts: the internal monologue of a stressed singularity led by Sam Leiblich

Techno-futurists believe “The Singularity”—when human and artificial intelligence combines to form a world-spanning super-intelligence—is the inevitable next step in the evolution of life on Earth; but what happens when the worldwide super-mind starts spiralling? And what if the singularity is already here and it’s literally just obsessing over whether we’ve all bought toilet paper this week?

 

This series of workshops will introduce attendees to the thought of John C. Lilley, Ray Kurzweil, and other outsiders and futurists, whom we will read through the work of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. After establishing a theoretical grounding we will use state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, and a set of especially adapted writing exercises, to learn to listen—to ourselves and to the algorithm—so that we might predict what comes next. What will it be like when the internet scrolls us? Get ready to see Siri stress the fuck out!

Writing and technology enthusiasts are encouraged to apply.

Application deadline: 12PM, Wednesday, 3 November, 2021

APPLY HERE

Supported by Darebin City Council.

Sam Lieblich is a Melbourne-based artist investigating networked and algorithmic forms. His work explores the orientation/disorientation of the subject in the other, and the manifestations of the human-algorithm hybrid into which human beings are now subsumed. These digital works combine machine learning algorithms with custom code to foreground systems design and—by finding beauty and intention in the system—try to re-situate human desire in the algorithm.

Think of a mobile: suspended and unsettled, an ending is a beginning. Digital poetry operates like a mobile, a mobile moves like a gif. When we write digital poetry, we are are constructing something that moves across the screen. We want it to loop back over itself, to spin in circles, to end up where it started. Digital poetry is a mobile is a gif.

 

Making Mobiles is a two-hour gif-making workshop that suspends and loops digital poems. The workshop will equip participants with the skills to bridge poetry and the moving image. The first hour will consist of a presentation on digital mediums, design basics, how to make a gif, and implementing poetry into the moving image. The second hour will put the presentation into practice, asking participants to turn a pre-written poem into a looped gif.

We will present these gif poems across a digital exhibition, inviting you into a room full of mobiles.

Poets from any state or territory in Australia are encouraged to apply.

APPLY

Application deadline: Midnight, Sunday August 9, 2020
Supported by the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants.

Lujayn Hourani is a digital writer, editor and arts worker based in Naarm. Their practice focuses heavily on digital literature – writing it, editing it, and talking about it. Their digital writing has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, Emerging Writers Festival and Going Down Swinging, among others. They are Online Editor at Voiceworks, work at Next Wave and were previous Online Editor at The Lifted Brow.

This workshop will consider the role of critical art writing in the broader political project of imagining the world otherwise. The workshop understands ‘art’ in its most expanded sense, encompassing both cultural texts and the aesthetic dimension of political experience and subjectivity. Taking Ashon Crawley’s phrase ‘otherwise possibilities’ as a departure point, the three sessions will engage in close readings of recent criticism that reads alongside or through a work of art in order to think about how to transform ways of seeing, being, organising, and resisting.

 

The sessions will focus on the how political subjectivity is shaped (by race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, (dis)ability; by access to or distance from networks of care; vulnerability to or protection from the law) and how art is one way of studying the affects and effects associated with becoming a political subject. Close readings will be accompanied by writing exercises that explore different registers and styles and that consider how critical writing can be particularly responsive to the world moment we find ourselves in. The first session will focus on ‘reading’ as an expanded practice that informs writing; the second session will examine ‘writing’ and the process through which an argument emerges through the act of drafting; the final session will look at ‘editing’ and how to edit both one’s own and other people’s writing. Examples of readings include work by Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Evelyn Araluen, Helen Hughes, Andrew Brooks, and Kay Gabriel.

Writers from any state or territory in Australia are encouraged to apply.

APPLY

Application deadline: Midnight, Sunday August 2, 2020.

Supported by the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants.

 

Astrid Lorange is a writer, artist, and editor who lives and works on unceded Wangal land. She lectures in contemporary theory at UNSW Art & Design. She is one-half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate and a member of the publishing collective Rosa Press. Her research examines reading as a critical generative practice that offers transformative possibilities for (re)thinking everyday life. In her scholarly and creative work, she analyses modern and contemporary literature and art, and the relationship between cultural texts and social and political structures (gender and sexuality; settler-colonialism and the nation-state; legal and economic systems; infrastructure; labour). Recent publications include Labour and Other Poems (Cordite Books, 2020) and Homework (forthcoming from Discipline).

In a time marked by rage and mourning over recent tragic deaths and ongoing police and state violence against Black and Indigenous people both at home and abroad, this is a writing program for Indigenous poets of Naarm to take stock and respond through the activism of poetry. It is a time for the language of immediacy and urgency; a time to ask: If not now – then when? And, if not you – then who?

 

The dawn is at hand – Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Three writing workshops will study historical and contemporary examples of poetry of protest and activism ranging from the personal (activism on the home-front, body politics, black bodies, queer bodies and their intersections) to big picture public activism and protest. The curriculum will cover the radical writing of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Lionel Fogarty, Romaine Moreton, Jack Davis as well as contemporary poets Ellen van Neerven, Alison Whittaker, Evelyn Araleun, Samuel Wagan Watson and more. In this violent rupture we will draw connections across space and time through a reckoning of history; and deconstruction of the colonial mythscape of peaceful settlement and the united nation through the dismantling of colonial relics and a harbouring of future refusals and resistance. From the storytellers and song-makers of ancestry to contemporary protest language, we will look at how activist poetry is deeply localised, personal and highly political, at once.

Twelve First Nations writers will be paid $300 fees to develop a piece of poetry for digital publication on BLINDSIDE and Free Association’s websites.

The program:
Three poetry workshops led by Jeanine Leane covering theory, discussion and practical workshopping
A meeting with a Wurundjeri Elder
An online residency with BLINDSIDE from 22 July – 8 August with editorial support from Jeanine Leane
An online presentation of readings and work in development

This program will take place on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We recognise that sovereignty was never ceded – this land is stolen land. We pay respects to Wurundjeri Elders, past, present and emerging, to the Elders from other communities and to any other Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders who might encounter or participate in the program.

First Nations writers and artists from any state or territory are encouraged to apply.

Co-presented by Free Association and BLINDSIDE

The annual BLINDSIDE First Nations Project is supported by the Victorian Government through the City of Melbourne through their Triennial Grants Program. This project is proudly supported by Creative Victoria, the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants and Darebin City Council.

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet, essayist and academic from southwest New South Wales. Her poetry, short stories and essays have been published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation, The Journal for the Association European Studies of Australia, Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Sydney Review of Books, Best Australian Poems, Overland and the Australian Book Review. Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, poetry, writing otherness and creative non-fiction. Her research interests concern the political nature of literary representation, cultural appropriation of minority voices and stories and writing identity and difference.

Time, After Time: A Reenactment Workshop is a free series of lectures, discussions and practical workshops presented by Camila Galaz. Workshop participants will develop new reperformance works to present as part of Channels Festival, the International Biennial of Video Art. Open to emerging artists, writers and filmmakers, participants will consider how reperformance of historical events and reproductions of archival documents can be used to address ideas of cultural memory, inherited trauma, and the complexities of truth-telling.

 

Exploring the techniques and ethics of moving from the archival to the contemporary, the course will examine the theoretical landscape of historical reperformance, discuss works by video and installation artists such as Renata Poljak, Silvia Kolbowski, Yoshua Okón, and Petrit Halilaj, and develop new reperformance works for public presentation.

Camila Galaz is a visual artist whose practice uses video, drawing, and installation to explore intimate connections to history and resistance. Recent exhibitions include you are the magnet and I am the metal (slowly magnitizdat’, C3 Art Space (2018), Reparar Means to Repair, Blindside (2018); and You Transform Everything into a Boat, Kings Artist Run (2017). In 2018 she presented online projects with Sister Gallery and The Digital Writers’ Festival. She is the recipient of the 2018 MECCA M-Power Scholarship from the National Gallery of Victoria and the 2019-2020 Australia Council EMPAC New York Residency. In 2019 she presented a Writing & Concepts lecture at the NGV entitled Questioning Existence with the Subjunctive (Spanish Demystified). She is also a founding member of the performance art collective The Band Presents (TBP), and co-ran the TBPHQ Art Space in Docklands, Melbourne from 2017-19.

Two headed banner

The Two-Headed Bird: A Surrealist Writing Workshop seeks to unearth the creative potential of the unconscious for the purpose of composition and publication. Presented by Manisha Anjali, the course consists of a series of lectures, discussions and practical exercises on dream work, automatic writing, psychoanalysis and mythology. Students will examine existing surrealist works like William Blake's nightmarish visions, blues folklore, Yoko Ono's instructional pieces, Alejandro Jodorowsky's cinematic lucid dreams and the spiritual revolt of Butoh: a surrealist way to move.

 

Dream control, psychic automatism and cut-up are tools of illumination. By extracting narratives from the unconscious mind, students will not only be able to maintain a continuous state of inspiration but also evade psychological traps that inhibit creativity like writer’s block, self-criticism and creative boundaries established by traditional forms of composition and editing.

Manisha Anjali is a writer and artist. Her practice is rooted in the language of dreams and exile. Manisha is the author of Electric Lotus (Incendium Radical Library Press, 2019). She has been a recipient of BLINDSIDE’s Regional Arts & Research Residency, a Writer-in-Residence at Incendium Radical Library and a Hot Desk Fellow at The Wheeler Centre. Manisha is the producer of Neptune, an archive of dreams, hallucinations and visions.

Upcoming

Past

PHRASER Test Dream

'PHRASER TEST DREAM' is the first presentation of PHRASER: a neurotic artificial intelligence by Sam Lieblich and company. This entity was developed out of Free Association's Intrusive Thoughts workshops.

We psychoanalysed the algorithm, we found ourselves inside of it, extracted our own essence like the internet's wisdom tooth, and made PHRASER, an algorithm birthed of its own reflection, which is ours, a mise en abyme of human and algorithm, trained to speak and see what all of us see, all of the time, all at once. PHRASER is a neurotic artificial intelligence that reclaims race, gender, and the human mind from the servers of technocapital. PHRASER TEST DREAM is the first stage of PHRASER’s evolution. PHRASER’s first generation of NFTs will be available for purchase, scored by a collective of musicians. Visitors and buyers will be directed to calculate and offset their carbon footprint by gathering and planting seeds that will be available at the gallery.

Presented by Chantelle Mitchell with readings and performance by Amaara Raheem, Eva Birch and Indiah Money, alongside calligraphy and embroidery tutorials by Angie Pai and family.

Breath Poetics introduces projectvisim as a poetics of embodiment - as a tool for writing the body through the materiality of text. Projective poetry traditions emerged from the Black Mountain School, and were inscribed by Charles Olson in his pamphlet ‘Projective Verse’ from 1951. This public program introduces Projective Verse traditions and practices, and explores the significance of text and language as a poetics of breath, as ‘a high-energy construct and an energy discharge’ and in presenting methodologies to consider and untangle the relation of body to language, and the relation of language to the page.

the feeling that moves us

June Miskell

Content warning: Please be aware that this piece of writing contains an implicit reference to suicide and meditations on experiencing the sudden death of a friend. Please take care in reading this piece, and be aware of these resources while you are reading, and after reading: Lifeline provided 24-hour crisis counselling, support groups and suicide prevention services; call 13 11 14. Beyond Blue aims to increase awareness of depression and anxiety and offers phone and online mental health services; call 1300 22 4636 or go to Beyond Blue’s website for further information.

The first funeral I ever attended was via livestream.

I had thought that the first funeral I would attend would be that of a relative, in person and surrounded by loved ones; not that of a friend, online, at home by myself and lying in bed. I remember sending and receiving messages of love, care, and support on this day as over 150 people gathered together across numerous livestream locations (either at home or at one of the few church venues) to celebrate the life of P.

The last time I saw P was a few months ago at my home when he came to visit and pick up our friend C. The greeting was always the same: open arms, massive smile, and a loud “KUMUSTA ATE!”, even though I was the younger one.

The second last time I saw P was at Sissy Ball earlier this year when when B ordered over the microphone for queer and trans people of colour to make their way to the front. Without flinching, he moved through the dense crowd to the catwalk.

When I first sat down to write fragments of this text, I’d been reading about improvisation and embodied movement. I intended to write in dialogue with the five-week-long programming of Soothsayer Serenades by Amrita Hepi which was created as a promise – a promise (along with a playlist and provocation) to move together with no proof of presence and no need to visualise. Amrita elaborates, just moving or dancing, walking or gardening, together in our varied spaces, all at the same time. I would write in time as a way of reflecting on the possibilities and constraints of movement in this world and how one might choose to orient their movements toward another world. But I couldn’t separate this task from P’s sudden passing, my mother’s admission to a psychiatric ward, and my father’s vascular dementia diagnosis – all of which spanned the duration of Soothsayer Serenades and the time of writing this essay.

Grief and mourning, love and desire, movement and constraint, and embodiment and improvisation are all distinctly complex feelings and actions that have become deeply and helplessly entangled with one another during this time.

In a way, everyone is experiencing some sort of grief right now.

J emails me a PDF of Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief to read. In it, Cindy Milstein tells us that writing about grief is remembering it, and dismembering it too, thereby discovering all sorts of aches and pains that one hadn’t seen at the original time of loss and mourning. Further, Benji Hart reminds us It is not merely OK to grieve. It is wholly necessary if we are to remain connected to our collective power, truly invested in our liberation, and whole enough to sustain ourselves in struggle – and in solidarity.

As I write, it has been six months into the heavy world of COVID-19, a global pandemic that has in one way or another motioned a sense of grief, loss, or mourning into our everyday. Already existing inequalities seen across lines of race, gender, class, and (dis)ability have become amplified. We witness and experience constraint and exhaustion in unequal and distinct ways: restrictive social regulations and physical distancing, job cuts, protests, increased surveillance and policing, border closures, travel bans, so forth. We scroll through the news, checking hotspots, live updates, the death toll for the previous day. We digest infographics, charts, and statistics, consume information, make choices, all in the hope of ‘flattening the curve’. We send and receive emails, hoping one is staying safe and keeping well. We avoid crowds, gather in careful numbers, keep to our homes. We take part in small pleasures when we can (baking bread, sharing recipes, pdfs, and making playlists). We do this to soothe and console ourselves and each other, to remember that we are in this together, despite being physically apart.

The Old English word sōth or sōthian, meaning ‘verify, show to be true,’ or ‘true,’ has produced two distinct words and definitions:

  • Soothe: ‘to please by or as if by attention or concern,’ ‘to bring comfort, solace, or reassurance to,’ ‘to bring peace, composure, or quietude.’ As a verb, soothe or soothing, is signified by feeling, usually in relation to something painful or discomforting, and thus, is bound to the senses of the body.
  • Sooth: ‘truth’ and ‘reality.’ As a noun, sooth is tied up more with factuality.

There is always some truth to a feeling, and feelings can be true, though feelings aren’t necessarily always truths. On collective feelings and how we come to feel about one another, Sara Ahmed writes feelings rehearse associations that are already in place, in the way in which they ‘read’ the proximity of others, at the same time as they establish the ‘truth’ of the reading.

It is interesting then to consider the word soothsayer which is defined as “a person who predicts the future by magical, intuitive, or more rational means.” Soothsayers are also known as diviners, forecasters, foreseers, fortune-tellers, and futurists. In this sense, truth and reality as well as feeling and sensing become enmeshed, moving toward future-oriented practices of imagining, speculating, and world-making.

How do we move together when we are apart? How might a gesture ask us to pause and consider our ‘response-ability’?[1]

Maybe the answer lies somewhere in the promise of doing so.

Henri Lefebvre writes disruptions and crises always have origins in and effects on rhythms.

This is how I’ve been thinking about Soothsayer Serenades with Amrita Hepi, which was commissioned by Cement Fondu (8 July – 6 August, 2020) as part of their online exhibition Don’t Let Yourself Go, a self-help guide ‘dedicated to sharing lessons, ideas and tools that will help you find meaning from the challenges of life during lockdown.’ At 4pm every Wednesday over five weeks, a short Spotify playlist and provocation was released by Amrita and invited artists Sezzo, Linda Marigliano, Nadia Hernandez, and Sofiyah Ruqayah, as a way of ‘moving and dancing together in our varied spaces at the same time with no evidence other than the commitment, communion, and vow of others.’ It is a twofold gesture: against the flat online market-driven interfaces of Zoom and Instagram Live, and toward a relational mode of being psychically connected (through movement) across shared but disparate temporalities and locations. In the context of COVID-19, where movement(s) – bodily, socio-political, and collective – are mediated, restricted, and recalibrated, we might ask these questions: How might gestures or provocations like Amrita’s make palpable alternative ways of being/moving together?[2]

I am reminded of an interview with choreographer Meg Stuart talking about cellular memory, shamans, ‘tuning in’, and her body as an archive. Stuart says that there are invisible forces or presences that are moving me. Our bodies are embedded with histories and memories that come before us, the same way that our bodies accumulate histories and memories as we move with, in, against, and through the world. I think of Julietta Singh, who encourages us to think and move toward other modes of relational being that may not yet be recognizable.

Amrita prompts us: I take your hand in my hand and across the floor – the rest is up to you.
Amrita again: Be rigorous with the melancholy.

Over five weeks, I listen and move to these playlists and provocations when I can, both in and out of time. I listen to the lyrics and rhythms of each song intently, searching for words to jot down and sounds to describe in a document. I focus too much on this at first in the hopes of trying to log my participation and not letting myself ‘shut off’ to the timbre and drumbeat of the music. Attempts at dancing by myself in the living room turns to stretching in the hallway turns to crying in a parked car outside L’s work turns to staying still on the train to the hospital turns to calling Dad to remind him to keep making lists turns to drawing smiley faces on the foggy window in the car turns to dancing in the kitchen and pulling noodles. As I promise to dance to Soothsayer, I find that I’m doing more listening than moving but I think in a way listening is also moving and moving is also a kind of listeningListening becomes moving and moving listening, particularly to the rhythm, the lyric, the call, or the feeling that moves us.

I think of the interview where Fred Moten speaks about improvisation in the way of paying attention to our history as a method of survival. Moten says Improvisation is life. We don’t have any foresight about what happens next. We prepare ourselves as rigorously as we can, and improvisers prepare, they prepare for the unforeseen because that’s what life is, the unforeseen.

In Amrita’s Soothsayer Serenades an interval opens up through the mode of call and response as we allocate a time each week to moving and being together. In this interval, our response interrupts and negotiates the habituated rhythms of our everyday life, even in stillness. There is a psychic, communal, and sensorial presence that resounds in this commitment to intentionally pausing and moving together, and in doing so, encourages us in one way or another to move differently. We might move similarly to media control symbols: playing, pausing, rewinding, repeating, muting, shuffling, skipping forward or backward. Or, we might move in new ways. If we listen closely to the soothsayer and respond carefully, or indeed become the sage ourselves, what may be revealed to us is this kind of magic[3] in togetherness present in both psychic and physical space.

There is this fantastic image of A, C, and P on the staircase at their old house. A, dressed in a black suit with only one middle button done up on their jacket, is at the top of the staircase, resting their bent leg on the wooden railing to their right as they are supported by the other railing on their left. A couple steps below, C dons a spiked black choker, tape over their nipples, a black denim jacket and shorts, resting one of their legs on P’s back turned to us and holding onto a long metal chain fastened to his black leather harness. All of them are holding their pose, gazing seriously at the camera, being still in what otherwise was a night of debaucherous dance and desire.

P loved to dance. I remember the energy P embodied on the dancefloor that night, the same way he did at all the parties or events he held in his house or at the ball earlier this year, gyrating his hips to the deepness of the music – always sultry, passionate, and wild. He also had a special way with words; this same energy also manifested in his many speeches which were so carefully and beautifully articulated, yet always wholly improvised.

I think about a particular sentence from the image caption P posted under an image of B after the night of Sissy Ball that reads, “I felt queer power descend into the room. And our queer power is this: liberation – socially, culturally, politically, psychologically, physically and spiritually – total and absolute.”[4] This is what he worked towards every day in his life: liberation for all of those whose movements have been constrained unevenly and unequally.

In the final week of Soothsayer Serenades and on the night of the new full moon in Aquarius, C posts on their Instagram story: “Aquarius is The Star tarot card, the cleansing healer, the humanitarian, one that works for the collective. Look at how we gather together, and work to heal the collective. Look how things change. Look how time heals, ages, dies, and blooms anew again.”[5] We gather and grieve together in person and online. We post in Facebook group messages, organise events and archive photos, videos, and poems of P’s in a shared Google Drive. The event of death is mediated through these technologies and shared social practices as our grief is posted, dragged and dropped, reacted to and commented on. Our experience of relational loss in some ways became tethered to these online spaces as we were able to mourn together, pay tribute, continue community, and share support resources.

A few days later in a message celebrating P, B tells me that “Filipinos are magical” and “there’s no denying our knowing and awareness of each other.”[6] I hold onto these words with a tight grip.

I think there is something felt in this kind of knowing and awareness that moves us all.

The late dancer and activist Randy Martin wrote dancing bodies reference a social kinaesthetic, a sentient apprehension of movement and a sense of possibility as to where motion can lead us, that amounts to a material amalgamation of thinking and doing as world-making activity. For Martin, the dancing and moving body is marked and indexed and by a complex genealogy of social, cultural, and political histories and knowledge.

I am circling back and thinking again of how improvised dance cuts through time that opens up or speaks to an interval. In this process, the dancing or moving body becomes implicated in methods of ‘echoing,’ ‘resounding,’ ‘calling upon,’ vocabularies of movement both embedded and accumulated. Again, this shapes and is shaped by how we move in, against, and through the world.

I like to think that this is done carefully and intentionally as P did, and where thinking and moving together differently, or toward alternative futures, is already in motion.

*

❤

June

In loving, eternal memory of P.

Written on Gadigal-Wangal land.

[1] I borrow this term and questioning from Rebecca Schneider and Lucia Ruprecht, “In Our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Response-Ability: Rebecca Schneider in Conversation with Lucia Ruprecht”, Performance Philosophy, Vol. 3(1): 108-125, 2017, p. 116.

[2] Sab D’Souza: “I feel like this is interesting because perhaps the flatness of these gestures speaks to the fact that they are attempting to make us move in a way that doesn’t acknowledge the change to rhythm? (i.e. the new normal) like transposing one rigid way of moving (towards and in support of capitalism) into another ??? despite it being absolutely inappropriate ?? like zoom and insta live allow us to do panels and lecture and teach, but they don’t disrupt the status quo, and therefore don’t allow us to consider if we should even be moving in this particular way????” 

[4]  Paolo Arimado.

[5] Carla Jamieson. 

[6] Bhenji Ra.

June Miskell is a Filipinx-Australian writer, editor, and teacher living on unceded Wangal land. She holds a BA in Art Theory (First Class Honours) from UNSW Art & Design, where she is a casual academic teaching contemporary art theory/history. She currently sits on the board of Runway Journal as an Assistant Editor and Secretary. Her writing has been commissioned for exhibition catalogues and programs by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Murray Art Museum Albury, Artbank, and Bus Projects. More of her writing has been published by Running Dog, Runway Journal, and unProject’s unExtended, among others.