Category: WRITING
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…
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…
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…
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…
Valentina Karga: Energies in Common
[First published October 2018 in HFBK’s Lerchenfeld Issue 45] It was some months before I realised that ‘banana-mami’ was in fact ‘banana mummy’. Valentina had been talking about the energetic powers of pyramids for a while, building and testing them for herself, placing ordinary bananas in their centres to see…
The Disappearance of the Sea and its Fantasmatic Recovery in Berlin, of all places!
[Originally published in Dear un 22/2/18] I’m looking through a tiny window at the silvery surface of the sea roughly 10,000 metres below. I don’t know where I am, or which ocean this is. After five straight days of lectures, workshops, panels, exhibitions and performances at Berlin’s transmediale festival, I…
documenta 14: art of the (im)possible
[Originally published 2017 in Broadsheet Journal 46.2] The fourteenth edition of documenta opened for the first time in Athens this April, two months ahead of a second opening in its customary home of Kassel, Germany. The exhibition is subtitled ‘Learning from Athens’, and is marked as much by its dual location…
Sitting around digital fires | (no)action(no)space in Schloss—Post
Last year I took part in the beginnings of (no)action(no)space, a collaborative research platform distributed over time and space, involving a shifting group of about 7 artists and initiated by Laura Bernhardt. We first gathered around a ‘real’ fire at the Bodensee lake in spring; some months later these shared conversations and…
documenta 14: Art, Athens, Austerity…
[Originally published in Runway: Conversations on May 15, 2017] _ In April of this year I found myself at the Athens opening of documenta 14, in terms of prestige and critical anticipation arguably the apex event of the global contemporary art world. I was with my friend Laura, an artist and cultural…
Market for Immaterial Value: Unmaking Debt and Other Fictions
[First published in 2016 in Runway Issue 30: ‘Ecologies’] Everything is jelly now Air, clouds, us The jelly is the material out of which the immaterial world is made and we are moving towards exhaustion[1. Notes by Nefeli Myrodia, edited by Valentina Karga, ‘The gigantic jellyblob: A participatory lecture-performance at Athens…