Stay true
It was only the second time the second cohort of Regional Assembly had gathered. And our special guest, the Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, called me the day before in a bit of a flurry. She said she didn’t want to just talk about herself for two hours...
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Like a lunar cycle
Regional Assembly, like a lunar cycle meets once a month, hovering over screens across a constellation of places we each call home. The rocks and minerals of our technologies web us together between oceans and land, ideas and art-forms...
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Broken Time Music
The one question that remained with me after the January gathering of Regional Assembly was about Paribartana Mohanty. How was it that Pari managed to laugh a small real laugh from the depths of the hell he had been inhabiting... 
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On having hope and imagining community
In her book All About Love bell hooks wrote, “..definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up...
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Of a prison wall
In the last session of Regional Assembly, we spent a significant amount of time talking about friendship and politics and freedom, and after meeting every month for almost a year it seemed the right place to end, and to begin...
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Frankie Snowdon and Amala Groom
Frankie Snowdon: As a regionally based organisation we’ve been really strong in going “We don’t just want to take our work to the city”. It’s really important that we also practice what we preach—and go to all the places that don’t get an opportunity to have work come to them.
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Selena de Carvalho and Katie West
Katie West: I guess that the capitalist system that we work in, you do feel pushed to get things done quickly. Living where we live now has helped this too but I’ve also realised that maintaining that sense of slowness in the process is really important for myself...
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Selena de Carvalho and Arie Syarifuddin
Arie Syarifuddin: Jatiwangi itself is like the industrial area of clay roof tiles for 600 years, nothing for the young people to stay there. If there was not the Jatiwangi Art Factory I could go to the big city to look for many possibilities, but since then, I have the ability to stay...
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Kate Just
Kate Just: She said, “you have to come home, you have to”. So I went, with this feeling of resistance. And when I got home my Mum was sitting on the couch doing two things which I had never seen her do—smoking and knitting…and I’m thinking “who is this person...
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Abdul Halik Azeez and Alana Hunt
Abdul Halik Azeez: One other thing that struck me in one of the conversations that I was reading was how you said you were less confident when it comes to exhibition making and presenting your work in exhibitions. And that’s something I can also strongly relate to...
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Jade Dewi Tyass Tunggal and Jacky Cheng with Alana Hunt
Jade Dewi Tyass Tunggal: I was homesick for the bush, for the beach, and I was realising the treasures of learning, for me to come back home. That was a big incentive, and that was around 2000, I think I had a paranoia about the Y2K bug. And I was surviving as a dancer...
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Zahid Rafiq
In this final episode of Regional Assembly's Conversations with the Assembly, Zahid Rafiq reads 'Frog In The Mouth' from his upcoming debut book, The World With Its Mouth Open. Introduction by Abdul Halik Azeez.
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