ABOUT

The Resistance live event accompanies the forthcoming issue of Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts co-edited by Kim Munro and Melody Ellis, which is interested in the relationship between creative practices and/as resistance.

As creative practitioners, there are various ways we might seek to resist and indeed come up against resistance in our work, many of which counter easy definitions. The journal and live event together ask: How might we understand the various and intersecting critical concerns of resistance? What is resistance as a creative act?

EVENT SCHEDULE

11am-12:30pm
Public Reading as Resistance (Marnie Badham and Kelly Hussey Smith)
‘Public Reading as Resistance’ is a shared response to the weight of institutional frameworks in which we spend much of our time as academics and students. Taking our institutionalisation as the subject of the action, ‘Public Reading’ uses the combination of bodies and texts in public space and the tactic of the ‘calendar meeting’ to restore the value of reading into everyday working life. Bring a book, a friend, a cushion, or a rug, to sit outside (weather permitting). Come for the duration or drop-in anytime to read collectively for resistance. Tea and biscuits provided.

12:35pm
Curators' welcome (Melody Ellis and Kim Munro)

1pm
Navigating Eternity (Paea Leach)
Paea Leach will perform an iteration of Navigating Eternity, choreographed and first performed by Alice Cummins at Dancehouse in 2017. From stillness to breath-infused form, revealing, concealing, dissolving, reforming, Paea’s moving renders the viscerality of death and dying, resisting an arrival to verticality and equally the fall.

2:30-4:30pm
Dumplings Darling (Alisa Tanaka-King)
Almost every culture in the world has some version of a dumpling - wonton, mantu, pierogi, samosa, tortellini, empanada and so on. Dumplings cross borders, generations, and belief structures to connect humankind in a unique and binding manner. Alisa will lead a dumpling making workshop accompanied by guided conversations on how dumplings can save the world. Gather with strangers and friends in an act of radical kindness and generosity to fold and to eat vegan dumplings together. Suitable for ages 12+. Maximum 20 participants (booking essential).

5:30-6pm
Between the Cracks: Unleashing the Power of the Dirty Green City (Queer Screen Production Practices in Australia: Angie Black, Patrick Kelly, Kim Munro and Stayci Taylor)
What if the key to greener city living doesn’t lie in greenwashed, bygone ideals? Can we take tools from queer thinking and dirt thinking to reimagine new modes of resistance and survival? Using the Edinburgh Gardens as both historical and emergent site, this live collaboration of filmmaking, screenwriting and sound explores the power of the alchemical relationships that occur when beings and materials engage in dialogue about dirt, insects, plants and water.

ARTIST BIOS

Alice Cummins is a multi-disciplinary artist, working in dance, film, performance and installation. Her current performance projects reflect the entwinement of personal/artistic, colonial, and planetary histories.

Melody Ellis is writer and Lecturer based in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT where she manages the Honours program and is a member of the non/fictionLab research group. Her interdisciplinary writing and research is interested in the politics of value, language, interpretation, art, and movement.

Kelly Hussey Smith and Marnie Badham collaborate on art, research and teaching across photography, art and social practice. Their projects include teaching an undergraduate social practice studio Forms for Encounter and Exchange with community partners, creative actions like Public Reading as Resistance, international collaborations like Doing Visual Politics, and writing and publishing including as co-editors of a special edition of The Journal of Public Pedagogies on ‘Artist-led Public Pedagogies in the Asia Pacific Region’. Kelly and Marnie are co-leads of the Social Practice research theme in the Contemporary Art and Social Transformation research group (CAST) at the School of Art at RMIT University in Naarm/Melbourne.

Paea Leach is a Ngāti Kuri (Northland Aotearoa) & Australian dance artist based in Naarm. Trained at WAAPA @ ECU (Perth 1997-2000), she worked for renowned companies Chunky Move, Eastman (Belgium), Australian Dance Theatre (2002 – 2016). She has been commissioned to make work across cultures and communities and has taught dance and movement to all kinds of humans and bodies – professionals, undergraduates, prison inmates. She acts as mentor and sometimes dramaturge, is a minor academic (Master of Fine Arts VCA/Uni Melbourne 2020) and a writer of poetry. She is currently a student of Osteopathic medicine at RMIT. Paea works in the in-betweens; between the language(s) of medicine and the sciences, and - supported by ongoing work in the realm of kinaesthesia and agency - the poiesis and language(s) of movement.

Kim Munro is a documentary maker, writer, programmer and Lecturer at the University of South Australia. Kim’s creative practice research explores ideas of the self and the collective, community archives, and non-human species. Her films that have been screened on television and at international film festivals. Kim is also the founder of the Documentary Film Society, an Adelaide-based initiative dedicated to building screen culture around experimental nonfiction film.

Alisa Tanaka-King is a Japanese-Australian artist, whose practice focuses on sustainability, community and the handmade. Her arts practice is an experimental exploration combining installation and the drawn line, performance, storytelling and food, and is underpinned by a strong foundation in traditional techniques and skills. Alisa is interested in archiving untold stories, documenting humans’ relationships to the world and natural environment, and how creative practice can be used as an innovative and alternative form of communication. Her multidisciplinary practice explores socially engaged practice, using art to better understand, communicate and document stories.

Queer Screen Production Practices in Australia (QSPPA)
QSPPA is a research collective comprising Angie Black (VCA), Kim Munro (UniSA), Patrick Kelly and Stayci Taylor (RMIT). Since 2021 they have been asking questions around what makes an arts practice uniquely queer, with screen as their focus. Combining their individual filmmaking practices (narrative, documentary, smart phone and screenwriting), they have pursued their investigation via manifesto, creative practice and focus groups with other practitioners and stakeholders.

For anything further regarding this event please contact melody.ellis@rmit.edu.au or kim.munro@unisa.edu.au.

Public Reading as Resistance #1, (2019-2022) RMIT fake grass in Bowen Lane, image credit: ceri hann

We respectfully acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the country where this event takes place, and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal Land.

This event was made possible due to the generous support of RMIT's Design and Creative Practice Enabling Impact Platform.