Public Grief, Public Space

Public Grief, Public Space
6:30-8pm, 31 January, 2025
6:30pm doors open with refreshments
7pm event starts

Esther Carlin and Adalya Nash Hussein explore the psychogeography of grief in the first Melbourne speaking from the I eye program. Readings from essayist Adalya Nash Hussein are accompanied by Esther Carlin’s short film Fault of Memory.

Longtime friends, Esther and Adalya had unknowingly both been working on similar projects—work on the relationship between memory and place, work that reflected on the way public and private grief overlap and discomfort one another, work that became increasingly interdisciplinary as each sought new ways of reflecting a shared experience of loss. Their relationship to these pieces metamorphised first with the context of the other’s, and then again with the shared horror of witnessing genocide through phone screen.

This event will feature readings of unpublished work from Adalya Nash Hussein, including the KYD Creative Non-Fiction Essay Prize shortlisted ‘Park’, a screening of Esther Carlin’s film Fault of Memory, and a conversation between the two about collective grief, memorialisation, the desire for privacy, artmaking and friendship.

Esther Carlin is an artist and filmmaker. She was the recipient of the 2022 Combined Arts John Monash Scholarship, and is currently organising speaking from the I eye, a program of readings and screenings that connects artists, writers and audiences between Brussels and Naarm Melbourne.

Adalya Nash Hussein is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, Voiceworks, Going Down Swinging and others. It has also been shortlisted for the KYD Creative Nonfiction Essay Prize and the Scribe Nonfiction Prize. She has edited for Voiceworks, Liminal, The Lifted Brow, Australian Poetry and The Victorian Writer.

To learn more about previous and upcoming events visit: https://speakingfromtheieye.net