Archives are Hot! – Workshop with Salote Tawale and Torika Bolatagici

This collaborative workshop explores how personal histories connect to social and political narratives through visual mapping and collective storytelling, anchored in the Fijian dialogical form of talanoa. Participants are invited to create a shared mural using collage techniques to examine themes of displacement, connection, and identity. The workshop explores what it means to be "from" more than one place and how personal collections take on new meanings in community. Participants should bring a photograph, object, or text relating to their personal history.

Salote Tawale

Salote Tawale is a multidisciplinary artist based on Gadigal Country. Her work explores self-representation, diasporic experience and her identity as a queer Fijian/Australian woman, drawing on colonial archives, Fijian objects, and oral histories. International exhibitions include the 2025 Hawai‘i Triennial and 2024 Yokohama Triennale. Tawale received the inaugural Create NSW Visual Arts Mid-Career Fellowship and is currently a Lecturer at the University of Sydney. A major solo exhibition is planned for 2027, at the Chau Chak Wing Museum.

Torika Bolatagici

Torika Bolatagici is an artist, writer, curator working in Naarm. Her work draws on her Fijian/Anglo-Celtic ancestry and explores the social, cultural and political movement of bodies and transcultural notions of value. Multidisciplinary projects, such as the Pacific Photobook Project and the Community Reading Room, use intergenerational and community-focused collaboration to tell marginalised histories. Bolatagici has exhibited in public and private institutions in the USA, Mexico , Yogyakarta, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. She is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art at RMIT University.

Qele ni Kalokalo

Qele ni Kalokalo is a collective of Fijian Australian artist scholars examining the relationship between Australia and Fiji from the perspective of the Fijian diaspora. Founding members Salote Tawale, Torika Bolatagici, and Talei Mangioni are interested in personal, intergenerational and collective histories of extraction, migration, vernacular ephemera and material culture. The collective is currently working with collections at the Chau Chak Wing Museum which will encourage collaborative knowledge-sharing and critical engagement with the ways Fijian histories and experiences are recorded, remembered, and reimagined.

Next Wave

Next Wave is a leading not-for-profit arts organisation dedicated to supporting early-career artists working across multiple art forms. Next Wave plays a defining role in the Australian arts landscape by empowering and advocating for early-career and experimental artistic practice in Australia.

This event is part of Next Wave's ALL School programming. ALL School is an artist-led learning program designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and idea swapping.

CAST

CAST produces art research that critically engages with social and public spheres with a particular interest in how artistic practices intersect with issues of equity, access and democracy.

Accessibility

The RMIT Garden Building is located at Level 5, Building 10, RMIT University 376-392 Swanston Street, Melbourne. This is a wheelchair accessible building with an elevator located behind Streat Cafe on Bowen Street (between Swanston and Russell streets).

Some on-street parking is available on LaTrobe Street. Trams operate along Swantson Street – get off at RMIT University stop and go to Bowen Street via La Trobe Street.

Artists in the Archive is supported by City of Melbourne