Hajer starts the Iraqi Diaspora Creative Network

The Iraqi Diaspora Creative Network is a network for creatives with Iraqi heritage to share and befriend each other. It is open to diaspora Iraqis of all ethnic and religious groups with a creative practice making art about anything and everything. We are LGBTQ+ friendly.

Iraqi Diaspora Creatives Network: Manifesto

So often stories from Iraqi perspectives are about surviving in a war torn country, escaping the war torn country or yearning for it.

But what if you are Iraqi and have never been to Iraq or only been a few brief times as is the case for a whole generation of us. What about our stories, the in between discourses we carry?

Ours is a position that only other diaspora kids understand. Living in the liminal space where home isn’t in the homeland nor where you were born or have grown up for the majority of your life. It is the legacy of the homeland in your history and the experience growing up outside of it.

It may be feeling an affinity and connection to the homeland or not at all.

The Iraqi Diaspora Creatives Network is for this identity. To strengthen the diaspora and build a community with the specificity that diaspora is not the same as Iraqi from the homeland. It is an identity in and of itself.

Find them on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/858723824625103

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Eda Gunaydin on 24 Hour Arting

YOUR LIFE'S WORK' BY EDA GÜNAYDIN

February 26, 2020

In her wonderful book Do What You Love and Other Lies about Success and Happiness, Miya Tokumitsu argues that we are increasingly advised to convert our passions into jobs, to eke profit out of our few pleasures. Turning one’s hobby into a side hustle is a millennial rite of passage.This pressure doubles as a demand for intimacy, a demand that we yield privacy. Because our hobbies are usually creative—whatever that means—they induce more personal investment than, say, data entry or answering phones, jobs which usually don’t ask for you to inject a slice of yourself into them. In fact, those jobs are degraded as being for the working classes, for that reason. Those occupations, performed by nameless and faceless individuals toiling in the Global South, are antithetical to The Individual, who is unique and special and someone, and deserves to feel that way. Everyone should work in the creative industries, if they can…

Read more in The Lifted Brow

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Encounter at The Sydney Festival

Felicity Castagna was the writer on the Sydney Festival piece, Encounter, which premiered at Prince Alfred Park in Parramatta. Description here:

ENCOUNTER

FORM DANCE PROJECTS, SYDNEY YOUTH ORCHESTRAS AND FLING PHYSICAL THEATRE | AUSTRALIA

WORLD PREMIERE

You’re in a place where the eels lay down and the cars light up. Where the Maccas sign is the biggest moon in the sky. It’s Parramatta. Summertime. Early evening. ENCOUNTER is your invitation to the neighbourhood.

This joyful, site-specific work of music and dance, set in the parklands of Parramatta’s Prince Alfred Square, is an exploration of the everyday extraordinariness and power of ​young people living in Western Sydney and regional Australia.

Directed by Emma Saunders and developed with a cast of 16 dancers and 48 musicians, in collaboration with award-winning artists, composers Amanda Brown (The Go-Betweens) and Jodi Phillis (The Clouds), writer Felicity Castagna, conductor James Pensini, and associate artist Rob McCredie, ENCOUNTER invites you to celebrate the indomitable spirit of youth and the world they find themselves in.

Arrive early at Prince Alfred Square Park and bring your picnic blankets to enjoy PRELUDE, a warm-up to ENCOUNTER, featuring a rotating showcase of short performances by local dance revolutionaries and community dance leaders.

PRELUDE artists include flamenco diva Pepa Molina; Bharatanatyam dancer Aruna Gandhi; Polynesian Cook Islanders Pacific Dreams; hip hop sensation The Buggy Bumpers; Feras Shaheen and his Dabke dancing mother; Diane Busuttil’s Feisty Femmes; Forge Tap Quartet; the rocking contemporary Dance Makers Collective; and international Sharp Short Dance alumnus Billy Keohavong and more to be announced.

Commissioned and produced by FORM Dance Projects

Supporting Partners: Sydney Youth Orchestras and FLING Physical Theatre

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Alice Pung visits The Finishing School

Alice was born in Footscray, Victoria, a month after her parents Kuan and Kien arrived in Australia. Alice’s father, Kuan - a survivor of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime - named her after Lewis Carroll’s character because after surviving the Killing Fields, he thought Australia was a Wonderland. Alice is the oldest of four - she has a brother, Alexander, and two sisters, Alison and Alina.

 

Alice grew up in Footscray and Braybrook, and changed high schools five times - almost once every year! These experiences have shaped her as a writer because they taught her how to pay attention to the quiet young adults that others might overlook or miss.

 

Alice Pung’s first book, Unpolished Gem, is an Australian bestseller which won the Australian Book Industry Newcomer of the Year Award and was shortlisted in the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary awards. It was published in the UK and USA in separate editions and has been translated into several languages including Italian, German and Indonesian.

 

Alice’s next book, Her Father’s Daughter, won the Western Australia Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary awards and the Queensland Literary Awards.

 

Alice's latest book Laurinda has been shortlisted for numerous awards in 2015, and she has also been shortlisted as Sydney Morning Herald's Young Novelist of the Year.

 

Alice also edited the collection Growing Up Asian in Australia and her writing has appeared in the Monthly, the Age, and The Best Australian Stories and The Best Australian Essays. Her series of children's books, 'Meet Marly' from the Our Australian Girl series are published in 2015.

 

Alice is a qualified lawyer and still works as a legal researcher in the area of minimum wages and pay equity. She lives with her husband Nick at Janet Clarke Hall, the University of Melbourne, where she is the Artist in Residence.

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Sheila Pham launches Tongue Tied and Fluent

Exploring Australia through the many languages we speak.

Millions of Australians speak hundreds of languages other than English, yet as a nation we have a frustratingly monolingual mindset that denies our multilingual reality. We're mostly on board with multiculturalism now, but we're nowhere near there yet with multilingualism. What are the implications for families raising their children in other languages at home? How does the monolingual mindset affect our school system and language education? Is it possible for languages to be maintained beyond a few generations?

Masako Fukui and Sheila Ngoc Pham explore these issues by talking to people from all walks of life sharing the experience of living with multiple languages. Listen Here.

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Hajer runs Sahra Salon

Sahra Salon aims to create a space where artists of varied disciplines can test the work they are developing. The event strives to harbour an intimate space of creativity and indulgence where sharing works and opening up a dialogue between the audience and the artists is at the core.

The word Sahra is an Arabic word meaning evening gathering. A family Sahra is often a warm intimate space where friends and family feast and share stories and anecdotes. It is special and memorable but can also leave way for tensions to run high. In this, it as human as anything can be.

Sahra Salon aims to bring this energy, in all it’s human force, to an arts space, bridging the gap between artists as exhibitors and audience as punters. In this space, artists aren’t just exhibiting but sharing and engaging directly with their audience.

Every Sahra Salon includes a showing and a group discussion. Each iteration of our salon will adapt to the venue it is in but rest assured there will always be good conversation and good food.

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Chloe Higgins Publishes The Girls

'Higgins spares nothing in her telling of the slow violence of grief, in the puzzlement of transformation and the skewing of sound mind from one instant of catastrophe...An exacting act of detonation, The Girls bares a talented writer's foundations at the same time as it raises the spirit of survival.' Kate Holden, author of In My Skin

In 2005, Chloe Higgins was seventeen years old. She and her mother, Rhonda, stayed home so that she could revise for her exams while her two younger sisters Carlie and Lisa went skiing with their father. On the way back from their trip, their car veered off the highway, flipped on its side and burst into flames. Both her sisters were killed. Their father walked away from the accident with only minor injuries.

This book is about what happened next.

In a memoir of breathtaking power, Chloe Higgins describes the heartbreaking aftermath of that one terrible day. It is a story of grieving, and learning to leave grief behind, for anyone who has ever loved, and lost.

MORE PRAISE FOR THE GIRLS

'A tender and heartfelt book, exploring the intricacies and long aftermath of trauma and grief with great frankness and directness. Its honest and exacting exploration of what happens to the body and the self in grief is deeply moving, without being excoriating, and the writing is both lyrical and tough - Higgins has a distinctive and accomplished voice, and this book is a beautiful achievement.' Fiona Wright

'An astounding new voice whose work mines the slippery regions between grief, sex, love, parents and children. This book is a rare find.' Felicity Castagna

'An urgent, poetic and skinless howl of a book.' Lee Kofman

In a memoir of breathtaking power, Chloe Higgins describes the heartbreaking aftermath of that one terrible day. It is a story of grieving, and learning to leave grief behind, for anyone who has ever loved, and lost.

ABC Radio Collaboration

Finishing School will be collaborating on a podcast series with ABC Radio National that will begin to air later this year. Here are some pictures of us learning the craft from the ABC’s head of story Sophie Townsend:

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