Dear Agnes
‘Dear Agnes’, was a contemporary public art program that featured site-responsive works by 12 artists and collectives for nine days over three weeks (Friday 10 March – Sunday 26 March 2023) at Truganina Explosives Reserve, Altona.
Fostering the conditions for art and education to thrive through interdisciplinary research. The processes of art and education have much in common – both have the potential to inspire, critique, educate and bring about change. Our research focuses on the intersections between artistic practice and education. We ask how artists/educators foster conditions for creativity and creative learning to thrive; and how to re-imagine educational systems that enable learner agency, engagement, autonomy, critical reflection, intelligent discernment, and transformation. We explore how core elements of the creative process can be deployed to imagine and reimagine new possibilities for learning and practice in both education, community and public-sector settings, as well as society more broadly, in order to build a stronger, healthier, more equitable and sustainable society.
CAST’s engagement with public art seeks to apply the principles of social practice, bringing about change in the public domain with ambitious local, national and international art projects. Building inter-disciplinary teams with expertise in art, architecture, design, sound, science and education, these projects reach out into communities while stimulating critical dialogue within and beyond the university.
‘Dear Agnes’, was a contemporary public art program that featured site-responsive works by 12 artists and collectives for nine days over three weeks (Friday 10 March – Sunday 26 March 2023) at Truganina Explosives Reserve, Altona.
Social Practice investigates the role of human interaction and social discourse in art making, institutions and systems of power, by drawing attention to and engaging with complex issues aiming effect social change. Collaborating with artists, communities, and institutions, this stream of CAST’s practice-led research is driven by an ethos of creativity, inclusivity, consultation and public participation. A combination of aesthetics, ethics, pedagogy, activism, advocacy and/or antagonism strategies and processes underpin social art projects motivated to change conditions and shift conditions of power.
In collaboration with The Social Studio, The Centre for Projection Art, and Composite Moving Image, RMIT students from Forms for Encounter and Exchange studio hosted a community meal, runway show, and projection festival at Collingwood Yards to celebrate the graduating designers from The Social Studio.
The residency was a ten-day interdisciplinary field school which took as its starting point our relationship to the lands of the Wodi Wodi and the Yuin of the South Coast region at the unique cultural and environmental context of Bundanon.
Creative Care explores creative practice research and teaching in relation to health and wellbeing. Our focus is on creative interventions and responses to cancer, aged care and mental health, as well as the social and environmental determinants and lived experience of health. Creative Care facilitates interdisciplinary, partnered projects that engage with the creative and health industries, working with researchers spanning the creative arts, design, health and social care.
Migration + Mobility + Art is an interdisciplinary research area within CAST, which examines various forms of migration and their critical impacts, and the challenges surrounding the complexities of mobility, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region, in the context of creative practices. '
This initiative brings together diverse researchers, including artists, curators, designers, writers and educators to share and develop ideas, initiatives, collaboration projects, exhibitions and publication around interrelated issues of diversity, nationalism, citizenship, borders, transnationalism, multiculturalism, diasporas, globalisation and belonging.
As a research area, we want to examine how creative and cultural practices can reimagine the social, political, environmental and ethical issues of mobility and migration in a globalising society.
Beyond the mainstreaming of issues such as marriage equality, queer cultural practices investigate the arbitrary construction of cultural paradigms, driven by an intersectional approach to social justice and embodied lived experience. Queer cultural practices go #beyondyes to generate reparative actions by gently holding together alliances of practice, ideology, politics and experience.
Queerness is a slippery field that resists definition. More than an alternative term for gender and sexual diversity, it is a shifting coalition of political and cultural positions and strategies that critique, defy and ignore arbitrary normativity. Queer cultural practices have been deployed to interrogate the cultural construction of gender, race and disability. In the 21st century, queer cultural practices are turning increasing towards new materialism and posthumanism to interrogate the agency of things and the culturally constituted hierarchies of objects and subjects, positioning the artist as ‘a thing amongst things’.
CAST is interested in the intersection of fashion and art research as a rich and dynamic field that offers insights into the complex and multifaceted relationship between two of the most influential and creative industries in the world.
Takeover was a program of public events held over 2022 that celebrated the agency of communities of diverse young and emerging creatives, creating the opportunity to take back public spaces following Melbourne’s successive COVID-19 lockdowns.
*Image credit
Acknowledgement of Country
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.