Join us this NAIDOC Week for the launch of Yoonggama Ma Nga: A First Nations Transdisciplinary Research Initiative.
Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO has a string of accolades for her opera performances, and as a composer and artistic director. She leads Short Black Opera, which provides training and opportunities for emerging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musical artists. In this keynote we will hear about her journey and her aspirations for the First Nations academy.
Yoonggama Ma Nga is an initiative to build the First Nations academy. It is a centre for land-based learning where First Nations Knowledge Systems are privileged and community research, training and learning needs are prioritised. The initial focus areas for Yoonggama Ma Nga are art, performance, language and culture, and the dedicated hub at RMIT provides a physical meeting point for First Nations scholars, from pre-doctoral candidates to senior academics.
Founded by Dr Vicki Couzens, RMIT Research Fellow, and Suzi Hutchings, Swinburne University Professor, Yoonggama Ma Nga is an RMIT initiative led by Vicki Couzens. Links are also being built with Swinburne University of Technology.
Refreshments will be provided and there will be opportunities for networking at this event.
'Portable Stillness' (2025), is an ongoing spatial installation that explores how the making of miniature objects and floating altar-like displays can express memory, collection, and the domestic in transition. Motivated by the instability of diasporic living and continual relocation, Ko Jou Chen constructs handmade structures that carry memory and presence across her shifting environments.
'Slip' is a practice-led research project that explores the poetic qualities of the bluestones that have been discarded in recent construction works around RMIT University. Through the process of moulding and casting these stones into beeswax, Noah Bridger hopes to reimagine Melbourne’s urban landscape.
Chloe Rose Thomas’ exhibition, 'Can I Hold You?' centres on queer community and embodied practices of care, exploring what it means to take traditional photographic portraits of non-normative bodies and the histories they represent.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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