Regional Arts Australia

Join Selenda de Carvalho and Katie West in discussion for the second episode of our second series of Conversations with the Assembly.

Selena de Carvalho (PhD) is an inter-disciplinary artist, designer, maker and risk taker of settler, refugee and migrant heritage based in lutruwrita/Tasmania- ‘Australia’. Selena purposefully connects creativity in a (post) activist context amplifying the ecological imagination through practicing relational ethos. Selena views her creative work as a cultural response – ability. Throughout this practice she seeks out materials and environments that have weathered various forms of frontline disturbance, with-nessing, witnessing and interpreting global warming and its local affects.

Katie West is an artist and Yindjibarndi woman based in Noongar Ballardong country, working in installation, textiles and social practice. The process and notion of naturally dyeing fabric underpin her practice–the rhythm of walking, gathering, bundling, boiling up water and infusing materials with plant matter. Using found and naturally dyed textiles, video, and sound, Katie creates installations, textile pieces, and happenings that invite attention to the ways we weave our stories, places, histories, and futures.

Katie West: I guess that the capitalist system 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 and my own mental health but also for the work too. That’s where the work comes from. That’s the value in it and that’s the thing to cultivate and protect from here on out.

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Conversations with the Assembly (Series 2) is a podcast that delves deep with practitioners from Regional Assembly—an online artist studio connecting creative practitioners living and working in regional and remote locations in Asia, the Pacific and First Nations unceded territories across Australia. Each episode will foreground distinct voices and amplify, challenge and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during Regional Assembly. 

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia

The Regional Assembly is a Regional Arts Australia program delivered through the Regional Arts Fund. The Regional Arts Fund supports cultural development in regional, remote and rural communities in Australia. The program is managed by Regional Arts Australia on behalf of the Australian Government.

In this podcast—the first episode of our second series of Conversations with the Assembly— Frankie Snowdon and Amala Groom join forces in a frank and forthright discussion that weaves together their shared interests in what constitutes sovereignty, the use of humour, the immense value of family, and the ways in which they navigate their practices across national and international contexts, while staying grounded in the local communities that mean most to them. 

Amala Groom is a Wiradyuri conceptual artist who lives and works on Wiradyuri Country in Kelso, NSW. Her practice, as the performance of her cultural sovereignty, is informed and driven by First Nations epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. 

Frankie Snowdon is a dance artist and the founder and Co-Director of GUTS Dance Central Australia, based in Mparntwe/Alice Springs on the unceded lands of the Arrernte people. Born and raised in her desert home, her work spans performance, choreography, teaching, community based projects, program creation and facilitation and sector advocacy.   

Frankie Snowdon: We’ve now started to do QnA’s after every single show that we do. And not just once in a season but every show in a season there is an opportunity to basically just have a chat. 

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Amala Groom: See that’s just healthy though. Because that’s debriefing. And that’s a healthy part of any social order. 

FS: It’s been so amazing. And I think particularly regional audiences, because we do a lot of regional touring as well. 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. And actually regional audiences are some of the most brave and articulate audiences and they just say what they think. They’re so wonderful. And it has informed practice for me in ways that I never got when I lived in the city. 

AG: It’s tough. And it’s raw. And it’s elemental. And you know, it reminds me of like of having conversations [with my grandparents]. I’m so lucky that my Mum’s parents are still with us. And that I get to spend a lot of time with my grandparents. They ran a sheep station on our Country. About an hour north of Bathurst. And they would tell me these old yarns… 

----more----

Conversations with the Assembly (Series 2) is a podcast that delves deep with practitioners from Regional Assembly—an online artist studio connecting creative practitioners living and working in regional and remote locations in Asia, the Pacific and First Nations unceded territories across Australia. Each episode will foreground distinct voices and amplify, challenge and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during Regional Assembly. 

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia

The Regional Assembly is a Regional Arts Australia program delivered through the Regional Arts Fund. The Regional Arts Fund supports cultural development in regional, remote and rural communities in Australia. The program is managed by Regional Arts Australia on behalf of the Australian Government.

“The body has always been central to my practice because I think, your body is your body. And I think especially having a child and seeing the way in which each day she looks a little bit like other people that I love and seeing the way in which she is made up of all of these other bodies that have come before me and before her. We have within te reo Māori, as a way of introducing yourself, something called a pepeha. You introduce yourself as a mountain and as a river, and you introduce your tupuna, or your ancestors, as yourself. I think I've always written about my body because it's my body, but it also doesn't belong to me. It belongs to many other beings and entities that have existed and will exist. You say, ‘Ko au te whenua, ko te whenua, ko au’— ‘I am the land, and the land is me’.”

Conversations with the Assembly is a podcast produced by Cristian Tablazon in conversation with the inaugural cohort of the Regional Assembly. Foregrounding personal and networked histories, their distinct voices, and the imbrications of their diverse practices with the nuances of identity, locality, and place, the relations of production, and the broader geopolitical life, each episode will amplify, challenge, and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during the Regional Assembly.

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia

“I have a problem with the concept of ‘artist’ - because art galleries and the Western canon of arts practice don't really resonate with me, though I love to create. The more that I speak to our [Māori] weavers and our people that are at home [haukainga] about their own practices, I realize that Mātauranga Māori, our knowledge system and our concepts of art — are embodied knowledge… connecting with the values of plants, ancestral knowledge, and encompassing things like food systems. It [Mātauranga] shows you ways to be able to understand the patterns within the environment. So I find the term 𝘢𝘳𝘵 to often be very abstracted.”

Conversations with the Assembly is a podcast produced by Cristian Tablazon in conversation with the inaugural cohort of the Regional Assembly. Foregrounding personal and networked histories, their distinct voices, and the imbrications of their diverse practices with the nuances of identity, locality, and place, the relations of production, and the broader geopolitical life, each episode will amplify, challenge, and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during the Regional Assembly.

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia

“I'm really careful to know who the traditional owners are for the places that I'm recording. I'm drawing places along the road that I've travelled past, but it's not my right to just sort of take the imagery. So for me, it's about relationships: who are the people connected to those places?”

Conversations with the Assembly is a podcast produced by Cristian Tablazon in conversation with the inaugural cohort of the Regional Assembly. Foregrounding personal and networked histories, their distinct voices, and the imbrications of their diverse practices with the nuances of identity, locality, and place, the relations of production, and the broader geopolitical life, each episode will amplify, challenge, and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during the Regional Assembly.

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia

“There's also that threshold that makes publishing so exciting: the moment of shifting something from a private to a public domain. And that threshold is the most kind of uncontrollable, dangerous, speculative space there is because you have no idea what's going to happen.”

Conversations with the Assembly is a podcast produced by Cristian Tablazon in conversation with the inaugural cohort of the Regional Assembly. Foregrounding personal and networked histories, their distinct voices, and the imbrications of their diverse practices with the nuances of identity, locality, and place, the relations of production, and the broader geopolitical life, each episode will amplify, challenge, and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during the Regional Assembly.

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia

“I'm really banking on my legacy being something that maybe is never felt and that is very gentle and very subtle in a way, but that can kind of break some of those cycles of trauma and break some of those cycles of isolation and scarcity that people have during this particular time so that they can be well and their families can be well."

Conversations with the Assembly is a podcast produced by Cristian Tablazon in conversation with the inaugural cohort of the Regional Assembly. Foregrounding personal and networked histories, their distinct voices, and the imbrications of their diverse practices with the nuances of identity, locality, and place, the relations of production, and the broader geopolitical life, each episode will amplify, challenge, and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during the Regional Assembly.

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia

“I'm quite open to just being seen as a contemporary artist rather than being served an Indigenous label. That my practice is about art, rather... and then I'm a person of aboriginal heritage, but that's a part of my art. That's all part of my work."

Conversations with the Assembly is a podcast produced by Cristian Tablazon in conversation with the inaugural cohort of the Regional Assembly. Foregrounding personal and networked histories, their distinct voices, and the imbrications of their diverse practices with the nuances of identity, locality, and place, the relations of production, and the broader geopolitical life, each episode will amplify, challenge, and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during the Regional Assembly.

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia

"Dust in capitalist ignation is the obsession with the act of cleaning and marginalising. It's obligatory in archaeology to clean the dust to see the past. So dust as a material or condition—it's a very complex and dense idea for me. So my conception of dust comes from the caste system and thinking about the politics of purity. And I see dirt, waste, remains, and excrement as the 'dust' that is produced by the hegemonic system. And I like to argue that we have to see the waste not only as a crisis of Earth's ecology, but as an ecology of politics. And it's important to think about the history of waste in relation to our social and political condition. It's only Dalit thinkers and philosophers who are writing books and also cleaning gutters. Toxicity has already created a caste in the future. So my idea of prophecy is not in the future but it's in the past that has not happened yet."

Conversations with the Assembly is a podcast produced by Cristian Tablazon in conversation with the inaugural cohort of the Regional Assembly. Foregrounding personal and networked histories, their distinct voices, and the imbrications of their diverse practices with the nuances of identity, locality, and place, the relations of production, and the broader geopolitical life, each episode will amplify, challenge, and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during the Regional Assembly.

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia

"I feel like there's a lot of potential in the space of art... especially at this time, to be able to hold space for the messiness, the chaos, the undoing of familiar logics and patterns and wirings of the world and of our brain. The empowerment and the agency that art and creative practices can offer are really integral as well to understand each of our own creative potential."

Conversations with the Assembly is a podcast produced by Cristian Tablazon in conversation with the inaugural cohort of the Regional Assembly. Foregrounding personal and networked histories, their distinct voices, and the imbrications of their diverse practices with the nuances of identity, locality, and place, the relations of production, and the broader geopolitical life, each episode will amplify, challenge, and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during the Regional Assembly.

To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly

To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia