In conjunction with ACCA’s exhibition On Vulnerability and Doubt (29 June–1 September 2019), ACCA is partnering with RMIT University non/fictionLab and 10 writers, artists and storytellers participate in Doubting Writing/Writing Doubt, workshop series and public program exploring expanded approaches to writing and criticism.
Doubting Writing/Writing Doubt builds on Writing in the Expanded Field (2018) taking the exhibition’s themes of vulnerability and doubt as a provocation for further exploring expanded writing: How can engaging with doubt and vulnerability help us let go of conventional writing positions, and go further into the expanded field in response to the exhibition?
Through an inclusive workshop-based model, Doubting Writing/Writing Doubt encourages discussion, collaboration and professional development through collective work on three program elements – writing workshops, a public forum and a digital publication.
The public outcome Doubting Writing/Writing Doubt will take place at ACCA on Wednesday 21 August, 6pm. Read more here.
Listen to the podcast here
Participants
Yoko Akama
Dr. Yoko Akama is an award-winning design researcher in the School of Media and Communication and co-leads the Design+Ethnography+Futures research program at RMIT University, Australia. She also established the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability in Asia-Pacific network. Her Japanese heritage has embedded a Zen-informed reflexive practice to carve a ‘tao’ (path) in human-centred design. Her practice is entangled in complex ‘wicked problems’, to strengthen adaptive capacity for disaster resilience in Australia and Japan, and to contribute towards the efforts of Indigenous Nations enact self-determination and governance. Trained as a communication designer, visualisation features strongly in her approach to catalyse learning, imagining and disruption through participatory interactions. She is a recipient of several major research grants in Australia and the UK and winner of the prestigious Good Design Australia Awards in 2014.
Ava Amedi
Ava Amedi is a writer and musician based in Naarm (Melbourne). His work centres on pop-songwriting, artist interview and various non-fiction styles. His work can be found in Un Magazine, Kill Your Darlings, Archer and The Lifted Brow Online. His investment in community building within the arts has lead to work with organisations including Arts House, Good Manners Music and the Floating Key collective. In the wake of a songwriting residency with The Push, his music work ‘Seatbelt’ was exhibited at the Emerging Writers Festival in 2019. He’s pursuing studies in philosophy and Indigenising at Monash University. You can find him on Instagram @alumied.
Sholto Buck
Sholto Buck is an artist and writer based in Melbourne. His practice attends to processes of queer meaning-making, and the relationship between language and image. By combining these two practices he aims to draw viewers into his subjectivity and hold them in atmospheric forcefields. Recent solo exhibitions include Forest of Ladders, RM, 2018 and Cut My Shadow from Me, Window, 2018. Recent book publications include Forest of Ladders, funded by Creative New Zealand. He is currently a PhD candidate in Writing and Publishing at RMIT, Melbourne. Sholto Buck graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts (First Class Honours) in 2017, from Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland.
Shu-Ling Chua
Shu-Ling Chua is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. Her work has appeared in Peril Magazine, Lindsay, Meanjinand Triangle House Review, among others. She is working on an essay collection exploring the intersections between life and art, with a focus on self-narrative(s), intimacy, deception, image and private/public personas. She writes from a place of unknowing towards a place of knowing. Shu-Ling has completed writing residencies at the Wheeler Centre and the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre. Her essays were shortlisted in the 2018 Woollahra Digital Literary Award (‘Through the Looking Glass’) and highly commended in the 2017 Feminartsy Memoir Prize (‘Don’t (f**king) ask me where I’m from, please’). She sits on the board of Peril Magazine and was producer of Noted Writers Festival and Voiceworks nonfiction editor. She has written about guilt, consent and the need for nuanced representations of Asian female sexualities. Her recent essay for Meanjin, ‘From the Other Side’, is about past selves, self-destruction and self-creation, and finding her next phase as a writer. She tweets @hellopollyanna.
Martina Copley
Martina Copley is an artist, curator and writer interested in different modalities of practice and the annotative space. Working in film and sound, drawing and installation, her doctoral research project at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2019, considered the transposition of the rhetorical figure of the aside as a poetic strategy in art. Recent exhibition projects and publications include No Notes (This is writing), with Francesca Rendle-Short, 2017; Unhidden, Counihan Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; Between these worlds there is no ordinary continuity, Melbourne Festival, 2016. Selected curatorial projects include; Works<30s No.46-55 – With Lou Hubbard, Nathan Gray, 2016, BLINDSIDE Play, Melbourne; I always read by listening to the text, 2014, Platform, Melbourne; Bridie Lunney: The place where the fire is kept, 2014, Phoenix Foyer Commission, Melbourne. Martina lectures at LaTrobe College of Art + Design in Melbourne and is the gallery coordinator at BLINDSIDE Art Space.
Pia Ednie-Brown
Pia Ednie-Brown is a creative practitioner and Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her practice, Onomatopoeia, is grounded in the discipline of architecture, while working across diverse media, methods and milieu. Her research seeks to work against anthropocentrism through revealing habitual oversights and unacknowledged agency in architectural environments. Her research has explored ethics, innovation, emergence, and emerging technologies, particularly in relation to creative practice research methodologies. Her writing and creative works have been published widely in international contexts, and she has edited two books: Plastic Green: designing for environmental transformation (RMIT Press, 2009) and The Innovation Imperative: Architectures of Vitality (AD, Wiley, 2013).
Melody Ellis
Melody Ellis is a writer and academic based in Melbourne/Naarm. She completed her undergraduate studies in Fine Art at Sydney College of the Arts, and a Doctorate in Creative Writing at RMIT University. Her interdisciplinary writing practice—including fiction, narrative nonfiction and criticism—explores an interest in the political and social ideologies of belonging, taste and emotion. She brings to the analysis of these themes an experimental, creative, aesthetic and critical response. Melody teaches literary studies in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, where she is a member of the non/fiction Lab.
Koulla Roussos
Koulla Roussos is a Darwin based barrister, lecturer, curator, artist and creative producer whose curatorial approach is influenced by her experience living in a culturally diverse location. She commutes between Darwin and Melbourne combining a legal practice in both jurisdiction with a creative practice as a curator and artist. Koulla holds and Bachelor of Law and is currently undertaking a Master of Art Curatorship student at University of Melbourne. She is a strong advocate for social justice and the arts. She has worked in Indigenous legal services throughout the Northern Territory, and social justice centres in NT and Victoria. Her opinion pieces have been published in Art Monthly, Art Guide, Crickey and the Daily Review.
Zara Sigglekow
Zara has over six years of experience as a freelance arts writer and curator, and four years working in the contemporary commercial galley sector. She was awarded a place in the Next Wave Kickstart Helix programme 2017 for which she presented a group exhibition, Great Movements of Feeling at Gertrude Contemporary in 2018. She holds a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne, and is currently Associate Gallery Manager at Neon Parc, and Marketing Coordinator at Experimenta. She has edited and written for print and online publications across New Zealand and Australia including Art Guide Australia, un Magazine and Artlink.
Anna Westbrook
Anna Westbrook is the author of Dark Fires Shall Burn (Scribe; 2016). She is a novelist, poet, educator, and a literary and theatre critic, with a PhD in writing from the University of New South Wales. Anna has read, spoken, performed, and given workshops at Sydney Writers’ Festival, Emerging Writers’ Festival, Mardi Gras Festival, and National Young Writers’ Festival, among others.
