A Library of Libraries

Aaron Perkins has a conceptual text-based visual arts practice that employs strategies of wordplay and orthographic abstraction to explore the failures and limitations of language within everyday epistemologies and communications. In works across painting, conceptual typeface design, collage, and artists books, his diverse practice displays a persistent interest in literary fiction, cryptic crosswords, dictionaries, and, more broadly, the book form and the act of reading.

Alma Sammel is a Franco-Italian-German curator, producer, and researcher working across exhibition-making, performance, and research-based artistic practices. Her work explores how curatorial formats can function as spaces of collective inquiry, narrative construction, and shared attention. She is currently completing a Master’s in Curatorial Studies (Exhibition Theory and Practice) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where her research engages planetary imaginaries, more-than-human perspectives, and alternative temporalities in exhibition practice.

Amelia Watson (they/them) is an artist based between Naarm and Kaurna Yerta. Amelia has traversed creative landscapes across Europe and Australia working in dance, puppetry, choreography, accessible dance and dance theatre.
Their choreographic work utilises movement, voice, text and anthropological research. They’re interested in researching the universality of experience; often collecting stories, anecdotes and written text from the public during creative development. Amelia is inspired by the interconnectedness of creation.
A graduate from Adelaide College of Arts, Amelia received the 2023 Helpmann Academy Fellowship to study Art in Bologna, Italy. Here Amelia developed their multi-disciplined approach to storytelling.

Archiving the Present / Tania Cañas Archiving the Present (AtP), a multi-site digital community archive that approaches remembering as a creative and insurgent practice from a Central American perspective. The project invites community members to contribute stories, images, objects, and performances, positioning everyday acts of recollection as sites of collective reflection and historical engagement.

Charlie Lee is a performance designer, artist, and writer from Aotearoa working across dance, text, costume making and performance. Led by queer/trans* ecological methodologies and aesthetics of collapse, they make work which sits in in-between zones, precarious balances, and feelings of anticipation. Charlie was part of the Emerging Writers Program at Seventh Gallery in 2024 and continues to co-facilitate a Trans Ecology reading and project group. Coming sideways from a scenography background, their writing has formed as a means of articulating and expanding the atmospheric effects of performance as a medium for desire, futurity, and alterity.

Darla Gabrielle Tejada is a Filipino emerging writer and art curatorship student based in Naarm. Their work has been published across galleries and magazines in so-called australia, including the National Gallery of Australia, Seventh Gallery, KINGS, George Patton Gallery x True Belief, Artlink, unExtended, Archer and KYD. Their foray into film criticism is forthcoming by Rough Cut and Kinotopia. They are hoping to write a thesis about the historiography of art in so-called australia through the art magazines published in the 80s and 90s.

Đất Nước Library is a Naarm-based community-curated library collection from Vietnam and the diaspora. Our aim is to encourage collective literacy, develop shared archives and create connection across the Vietnamese experience.

Growing up in the diaspora on the colonised lands of Australia, much of the literature we have had access to and consumed has prioritised a westernised view of the world which has marginalised our stories and voices.

Đất Nước Library celebrates the plurality of the Vietnamese narrative, and inspires to create a more culturally connected and close community.

Dogstar / Aeva Milos Dogstar is a small interdisciplinary publishing press. Dogstar is interested in destabilising the conventional form of printed works and seeks to hone in on the ‘book’ as a site of immersion and interactivity. Dogstar’s first publication is slated for release later this year. She is also a writer based in Naarm. Her work has been published in Going Down Swinging, Demure Magazine, Gems Zine and more. She is a Voiceworks Online editor. She is a bookseller by day.

Elena Hogan is an emerging writer and multidisciplinary artist working on unceded Wurundjeri land. Since 2021, Elena has dedicated her artistic practice to her debut novel, Everything Before Gia—a family saga, queer mystery and social commentary on transgender rights. Elena's artistic practice celebrates experimental storytelling and research through the use of collage, paper and handwritten materials, which she has subsequently used to construct both her own identity and her unpublished novel.

After two semesters studying the Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) at the VCA, Elena completed her Bachelor of Arts (English and Creative Writing) at the University of Melbourne followed by a Diploma of Graphic Design at RMIT in 2025. She has worked with Regional Arts Australia, the Emerging Writers Festival and was featured in The Next Big Thing and the National Writers Conference in 2024.

Emmalyn Hawthorne is a Magandjin/Brisbane based artist and writer. A
process of collage investigating negative space has brought her to an
expanded practice using new media processes. She is interested in how
unusual juxtapositions and semantic multitudes in life foreground our need to
make meaning. "There is something sad but also really human and honest in
trying to narrativise the incongruous."

Exhibition and project highlights include: Orrery, a website produced with
Hannah Jenkins for KINGS Artist-Run; Astrolabe at TCB in Naarm/Melbourne;
Kerning, a group show in Naarm and Aotearoa/New Zealand; and Ways of
Knowing- Tracing Place at the University of Tasmania's Inveresk Library.

Esther AnatolitisWriter and broadcaster Esther Anatolitis is Curator of Frameworks for Practice, a
long-term commitment to facilitating dynamic spaces for critical reflection. A
highly respected champion of artists’ voices, for over two decades she has led
some of Australia’s most impactful arts and media organisations, actively
fostering a culture of courageous advocacy for the arts. Esther is the author of
Place, Practice, Politics (2021) and When Australia Became a Republic (2025),
editor of Meanjin (2022-2025) and Essays that Changed Australia (2024), and
author of the forthcoming Who’s Afraid of Australia’s Artists? (2027). Her auto-
archive work INDEX-SYSTEM was first exhibited in 2016 at Mailbox Art Space.

Jasmin Seale is an artist based in Naarm, working across video, print, and installation to explore the motivations and mechanisms behind acts of documentation. Her practice examines the individual as collector, the tension between purpose and obsession, and the DIY forms of archiving born from the urge to hold onto what might be lost.

Jessi Ryan (they/them) has been creating performance and exhibitions for the past 20 years, both locally, nationally and abroad- in this time collaborating with a huge number of artists from a broad cross section of cultural backgrounds. As a journalist they have written for and been published by some of Australia’s leading arts and news editorial across the last 10 years-and was recognised as a finalist for Globe Community Media Award in 2021. Ryan has also taken photos for a number of print and online publications.

Jordana Infeld is a writer and independent researcher. Her collaborative book of poetry, Certainly (certainly), co-written with Rachel Schenberg, was published in 2023 by no more poetry. She holds a PhD in literary studies and currently works in a library.

Kaiqi Li is the founder of betweenia project, an art book & zine distributor as well as an emerging publisher, exploring approaches to working in-between in an increasingly divided world. With a unique collection focusing on diverse practices from Chinese-ethnic and Chinese-speaking communities across the Asia-Pacific, we position the divergences and convergences of the Sinophone experience as critical entry points into the entangled histories and ongoing debates within the region.

Karina Miriklis is a curator and researcher whose work explores textile history, feminism, and cultural sustainability. She holds a Master of Curating Contemporary Design from Kingston University with the Design Museum London, and a Bachelor of Photography from Photography Studies College Melbourne. With experience across museums, galleries and grassroots organisations in the UK, Australia, and Cyprus, Karina supports inclusive and community-led approaches to collections and cultural heritage research. This includes volunteering across wide range of organisations such as the Melbourne Art Library, Women's Art Register, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Art Fair, Fashion Heritage Network Cyprus, Crafts Council UK, and more.

Kitty Owens is an artist, writer and freelance history curator who is obsessed with
museum collections. Kitty has a research-based practice and makes artists’ books
and serial works that play on history and memory. She has created publications and
installations for the Cities of Darebin, Greater Dandenong, Merri-Bek, Whittlesea, as
well as the Melbourne UNSECO City of Literature Office.

Lea Rose is a Naarm based political geographer and emerging artist. Rose is a PhD Transdisciplinary Graduate Researcher at the University of Melbourne, Faculty of Science, working across Cultural and Human Geography, Fine Arts and the Indigenous Knowledge Institute. Rose’s research and artistic practice combines scientific inquiry and multidisciplinary contemporary art to critically examine the impacts of colonisation on the Australian national psyche and the cultural injustices experienced by First Nations Peoples and their lands.

_ Leisa Shelton / Fragment31is a performance artist, teacher, mentor, curator and intercultural facilitator with a practice that focuses on collaboration and advocacy for resilient communities of practice. Recent projects have focused on Artist led Experimental Archives and publicly curated collections for public spaces, libraries and international festivals.

Major works include; MAPPING_Australian Experimental Practice, SCRIBE, a democratic archive of audience experience at live cultural events, addendum; _burning the Archive, and the 10yr retrospective work Archiving the Ephemeral, 2013-2023.

She has been the curator of the Australian program for the Venice Performance Art Week, 2012-2016, led MFA courses in Performance, Community and Cultural Practice, (VCA) alongside a national and international independent teaching practice.

Liam Vaughan is a librarian, independent archivist and freelance research assistant. He runs Melbourne Art Ephemera Archive, an independent local history project collecting exhibition literature and documents from artist run spaces, offsite projects, and nonextant commercial galleries in Melbourne.

Madelaine Mackaway is a recent graduate of the Graphic Design honours program at the University of Melbourne. Her practice is an exercise in critical graphic design that treats the urban environment as a living text. Stylistically, this results in a tactile, research-led approach that privileges materiality and process. Her work exhibits a typographic sensibility, employing text in angular compositions that challenge default structures. These foundations converge in a design language that embraces the unfinished, using the visual systems of bureaucracy to create spaces for critical public engagement.

Molly Stephenson's practice involves summoning the material past into the imaginary present through the process of assemblage. Diaristic in nature, she collects and archives found objects of significance and assembles them to create three dimentional forms. Informed by performance theory, new materialism and hauntology, Molly comments on what it means to attune to what lingers, authorship and affectual sensibility.

Melbourne Art Library offers an ever-growing collection of specialised art and design books, art books, zines, serials, ephemeral materials and other publications. Proudly independent, they are curious about what being a 'library' means.

N0 R3PLY is a creative group based between Naarm/Melbourne and Mexico City, founded by Azul Bermudez (former exhibition designer at ACMI) and Sen Vanderzalm (Co-Curator of Melbourne Art Book Fair). We work across exhibition design, curation, installation, workshops and event production. Our practice sits at the intersection of design, contemporary art and community practice, creating events that invite participation and connection. We take a hands-on, research-driven approach to our projects, working from concept through to delivery to create site-responsive and innovative offerings. Our past engagements include: Press Print Party Jakarta (25), Cadena Festival (25), Melbourne Art Book Fair (24,25,26), Melbourne Design Week (25,26), International Biennial of Posters Mexico (24, 26).

Dr Niamh White is a writer and researcher who lives and works on Wurundjeri land. Their research explores how young queer women and sapphic people connect to queer pasts through social media, interrogating how the pressures of our mediated present shape individual and collective modes of memory, meaning-making, and subjectivity formation. She is also part of two ARC-funded projects focusing on different elements of youth digital practices. As they recover from their PhD they are increasingly interested in exploring non-linear modes of storytelling, archiving, and communicating research that extends beyond and challenges the confines of academia through collaging and experimental writing practices.

Pagbasa Archive is an experimental archive of contemporary Filipino art, design, text, sound, ephemera, performance and video based in Naarm/Melbourne.

Established in 2023, Pagbasa Archive is led by Catherine Ortega-Sandow and MJ Flamiano in collaboration with Saluhan Collective. The archive is free to access during opening hours and at pop-up events held throughout the year. The archive features works by artists, writers, designers and communities from across the Arkipelago of the Philippines and the Australian continent in addition to works collected from the U.S. and European-Filipino diasporas.

The model for the archive was informed by roundtable discussions with Filipino artists and community members living and working on the Kulin and Eora Nations. These discussions invited participants to reimagine the potential of a cultural collection and knowledge paradigm led by and for our communities. The archive extends beyond the parameters of a traditional library or museum by creating a platform for Filipinx artists and community members to gather, collaborate and exchange ideas.

Roundtable Readings / Lili Grace Ward Roundtable Readings is a gathering, of writers of any nature, blog writers, diary writers, letter writers, dispatchers of emails with kind regards, senders of inordinately sized text messages, or inappropriately intimate tumblr posts, writers of romantic google reviews, writers of no consequence, writers of no tangibility, essay writers, dumb writers, clever poets and those enthused by any of the latter.

Saluhan Collective is the creative collaboration of artists Aida Azin, Catherine Ortega-Sandow, and MJ Flamiano. Since 2019, they have developed a diverse body of  work, including exhibitions, events, workshops, community gatherings, and film screenings, in partnership with organisations such as Arts House, SEVENTH, Next Wave, Footscray Community Arts, Testing Grounds, and Siteworks. Their practice is deeply rooted in Filipinx concepts of kinship and reciprocity, with a focus on creating spaces that interweave artistry and community engagement.

Sarita Slater is an emerging artist navigating the intertwined worlds of prose, poetry, and imagery through the lens of single motherhood. Her autobiographical work intimately explores culture, family, memory, belonging, and the transformative journey of raising a child alone. As a second-generation bi-racial Australian with roots in Northern America and Southern India, Sarita’s heritage deepens her reflections on identity, place, and resilience.

Silent Army Archive is a residency project of a living archive that exists to share and discuss small press publications.

The Commons Library exists to make social movements smarter and stronger. We are an online library for the change makers of the world and for those interested in social change, activism, advocacy and justice. We support the power and effectiveness of progressive social change efforts by collecting and sharing resources from Australia and around the world.

Queer Theory Reading Group / Zoë Bastin Originally founded at RMIT University in 2018 by Artist-Academic, Zoë Bastin, Queer Theory Reading Group quickly became a hit, drawing in an enthusiastic crowd of creative and curious minds. Now, with over 100 people on our mailing list, it’s become a platform to celebrate excellence in LGBTIQA+ thinking and research while fostering a vibrant queer academic community outside of universities.

Founder Zoë Bastin facilitates each session, framing the conversation, introducing the host, and keeping the vibe fun and thought-provoking.

Grey Dear is a multidisciplinary artist and discursive practitioner with special interests in collective thinking, ecosomatics and perceptual experience. Coming from a dance background, Grey employs choreographic and embodied approaches across the diverse tendrils of their practice. They create sensorially and intellectually engaging experiences, whether it be an experimental talk, action in a gallery, performance in a theatre or outdoor engagement in a public setting. Grey has been working with Dancehouse to run On The Table - a public program for interdisciplinary exchange and experimentation - for 5 years at Dancehouse with Rebecca Jensen and Ebony Muller. Their work has been hosted by numerous theatres, galleries and festivals across Narrm and Stockholm including Bundoora Homestead, Kings Gallery, c3 and Index Contemporary Art Foundation.