Then the Letting Go

Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight Aaron Aryadharma Matheson 23 May – 15 June 2024 Liverpool St. Gallery, Sydney [First published in 2024 as catalogue essay for Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight, Liverpool St. Gallery] Monday mid-morning and we’re at church. It’s a compact old one, on top of a hill in a leafier pocket…

Breathe Together ∞ Aspergillus Tubingensis / The Things We Made Next

Last autumn I was commissioned by Assembly for the Future to make a speculative design for The Things We Made Next, a travelling exhibition that visited Alice Springs, Castlemaine and Melbourne as part of Melbourne Design Week. Five designers were asked to respond to an archive of multi-artform ‘despatches’ produced…

Feminist Infrastructure for Better Weathering

[co-authored with Jennifer Hamilton & Astrida Neimanis, published Oct 2021 in Australian Feminist Studies online] ABSTRACT: Big infrastructure responses to climate change seek to protect the heteropatriarchal capitalist status quo. In contrast, this article develops a theory and method of practice-led research to facilitate better weathering. In so doing the…

Extinction archive at 2nd Macao Biennale

The collected archives of the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge & its associated Extinction Club Reading Group travelled earlier this year to Macao for ‘Art Macao: Macao International Art Biennale 2021‘, July – October 2021. They were installed at the Macao Art Museum as part of the main biennale exhibition,…

Gardening Essentials / in Uncertain Arrangements with Ghosts, Among Others

[Published in Judith Wielander & Gilly Karjevsky (eds.) Parckdesign 2016: Jardin Essentiel, Parckdesign, Brussels, 2020. The book documents Jardin Essentiel, a public art project with medicinal herb garden and distillation lab in Parc Duden, Brussels, on which I worked over the summer of 2016]. In the beginning there was a…

Lichen on the airwaves

In August I made an experimental radio piece with Sumugan Sivanesan across time zones and continents for Mustarinda’s Lichen Fest #2, a festival celebrating the 10 year anniversary of this remote forest residency in central Finland. It was intended to take shape as a live performance at Mustarinda House but…

Reading Together on Extinction in Beijing

I spent the second half of 2018 at the Institute for Provocation (IFP) in Beijing, China, via the Australia Council International Residencies program. Apart from eating noodles, one thing I ended up doing a lot of was reading with others about extinction. You can read more about what we read…

More being with mushrooms, at Saari Residence

2019 was filled with mushrooms. Sweet dessert mushrooms, big fat blue ones, tiny pea-sprout-tasting ones, pretty much any kind of edible mushroom you can imagine. For two months I was an autumn Saari Residence fellow in the Kone Foundation’s country manor near Turku, southern Finland, being taken mushroom-picking by hairdressers,…

Creole Gardens: Growing Otherwise

[Originally published in Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza (eds.) Mondialité Or the Archipelagos of Édouard Glissant, Brussels, Skira/Boghossian Foundation Villa Empain, 2017. Also translated into French for the French edition]. The question of how to live amongst plants must emerge peculiarly in those times and places experiencing what could…

Multispecies Storytelling in Sweden

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to present a new performance-lecture in collaboration with Sumugan Sivanesan – on behalf of the T. Rudzinskaite Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society – at the symposium Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practice, held at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden (Jan 25-27). Our paper, Speculative Flummery…