MUMA Podcast

This is a three-part audio series documenting the event ‘VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising’. Initiated by Monash University Museum of Art in Naarm/Melbourne, VERS took place over two days on Kaurna Country in Tarntanya/Adelaide at Samstag Museum of Art and ACE in June 2022. VERS was developed by a curatorial panel consisting of Arlie Alizzi, Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jeff Khan and Melissa Ratliff, and emerges as a response to their...

This is a three-part audio series documenting the event ‘VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising’. Initiated by Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Naarm/Melbourne, VERS took place over two days on Kaurna Country in Tarntanya/Adelaide at Samstag Museum of Art and ACE in June 2022. VERS was developed by a curatorial panel consisting of Arlie Alizzi, Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jeff Khan and Melissa Ratliff, and emerges as a response to...

Guests: Archie Barry Pip Wallis Sarah Rodigari Host: Kate Barber The second episode in the Language is a River podcast commences with a conversation between artist Archie Barry and curator Pip Wallis, discussing Barry's work Scaffolding (Preface) 2021, and speculating about the future potential of vocality together with the recurrence of singing as a medium in their practice. This is followed by artist Sarah Rodigari introducing the sound component of their installation work, Towards an...

Guests: Akil Ahamat Ellen van Neerven Host: Kate Barber In the first episode we hear from NSW-based artist Akil Ahamat together with Meanjin/Brisbane based writer, editor and educator Ellen van Neerven, whose four poems open the Language is a River publication. NSW-based artist Akil Ahamat introduces their two single-channel video installations in the exhibition, Muscular Dreams 2016 and So the spaces between us can stay soft 2018, and discusses the use of storytelling and very specific...

The final episode of Tree Telling, titled Future Tree, features special guests who are thinking about and actively engaged with the future of trees. Dr Jen Sanger and Steve Pearce from The Tree Projects are on a mission to preserve Tasmania's giant trees for future generations. They will be talking us through the complex logistics involved in photographing one of the southern hemisphere's tallest trees; an 84m tall eucalypt called 'Gandalf's Staff' located in Tasmania's Styx Valley. We are...

For Special Branch artists, activists and academics share their deep and personal connection to trees. Author, art historian and curator Janine Burke, reads an excerpt from her most recent book, My forests: travels with trees, published by Melbourne University Publishing (MUP). Marc Parlange, Provost and Senior Vice-President of Monash University, discusses the ways in which his academic research has intersected with trees across various sites in France, Burkina Faso and Vancouver. Associate...

As part of Melbourne's Urban Forest Strategy, over 70,000 trees were assigned individual IDs and email addresses to allow people to report on their condition. An unexpected result was that people from around the world started writing personal letters to the trees, including love letters, musings on life and bad tree jokes. In this episode we learn about the City of Melbourne's Urban Forest Strategy and hear a few of the love letters written to the trees. We also speak with composer Ciaran...

I speak for the trees centres on trees and those who speak on their behalf. Professor Tim Entwisle discusses the concept of plant blindness-the inability to notice or recognise the plants around us-and ways in which we can increase our plant literacy. Professor Jaklyn Troy addresses the ecological knowledge and deep connection First Nations' people have with Country, together with a call for the reinstatement of Indigenous names for plants and trees in Australia. The episode closes with...