Culture

From 3-5 October 2022 RMIT Culture presented The Mindful Art Project in collaboration with RMIT Creative, and The Big Anxiety festival. Drawing on art therapy and facilitated by artist-educators Live Particle and a team of student facilitators, participants were able to engage with artworks from the RMIT cultural collection in quiet, playful and imaginative ways, using mindful moving and meditation practices to improve their wellbeing.

Writers Shokoofeh Azar and Zana Fraillon share their experiences writing about migration, detention and inhumane border policies, with host Astrid Edwards.

Step backstage and explore The Capitol’s hidden corners with Peter Malatt, architect and founding director of Six Degrees Architects, and Professor Martyn Hook, Dean, School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT. This guide takes you behind-the-scenes, through The Capitol’s curving staircases, historic serveries and galleries, and spaces not usually accessible to the public. 

A panel of ‘circular’ system advocates will discuss strategies such as localisation, product stewardship, new business models, co-design, and 3D technology. Hear how designers, start-ups, and industry might become circular and localised in their practice and create interventions in the local fashion industry towards systems-level change and sustainable fashion futures.

Performance artist and theorist Nancy Mauro-Flude in conversation with exhibiting ‘Future U’ artists Holly Block, Alexi Freeman and Associate Professor Leah Heiss about their innovative practices. Together they delve into how some of these new technologies help us overcome challenges, but also how they may raise further questions or enable unexpected opportunities.

Watch highlights from the emotionally textured performance of synthwave and technopop by iconic underground artist Simona Castricum.

An excerpt from Ara Koufax's Melbourne Music Week 2021 performance. In SCREAM, Ara Koufax soundtrack their own experimental film about psychic violence. Pitch-black and occasionally tongue-in-cheek, SCREAM pairs electronic soundscapes with rollercoasters, SWAT raids, red carpet premieres and all manner of everyday horror.

A panel discussion taking inspiration from Matt Wolf’s stranger-than-science-fiction documentary Spaceship Earth (2020) about eight visionaries who in 1991 spent two years quarantined inside a self-engineered replica of Earth’s ecosystem. This discussion will take a deep dive into climate resilience, earthly dystopias, speculative fictions, life on Mars and eco-futurism.

A live conversation with the acclaimed British filmmaker, Peter Stickland about his wickedly hypnotic fashion satire In Fabric (2018).

‘Tarun’ (2020) examines the reckoning of homecoming and belonging when Tiyan Baker returns to her mother’s birthplace in Sarawak (colonised by the British and then Malaysia), to learn the Bidayuh language and understand the jungle culture that might have been her own.

Moderated by Virginia Trioli, this event includes a presentation by Kerstin on her public and community focused projects exploring the theme of ‘cultural memory'. The presentation is followed by a panel discussion featuring Kerstin, and guests from across architecture, education, visual art, local government, and community.

In this conversational workshop, hear from an author and editor about the author-editor relationship and gain valuable insights into writing a book proposal that will grab a publisher's attention. Associated with a partnered project between RMIT Culture and Hardie Grant books.

In this conversation recorded for The Big Anxiety, acclaimed writer, Siri Hustvedt talks with festival director, Jill Bennett, extending on their chapter in the book, The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2022).