FOPA is happening next weekend! Scroll through to see our full program guide, or download it via the link in our bio. If something catches your eye, book now! Spaces are limited and the days are filling fast.
The so-called crisis in education is over, we are simply moving on... and so we asked those participating to respond to a nominal orientation this year.
“Institutional Drift, Value at the Threshold”
How the program has taken shape is a credit to those involved in the para-academic sphere.
We will have subtle and nuanced connections between the various sessions. There are however, a number of stand-out thematics across the program.
∙ Onto-politics, sovereignty, occupation, liberation and Treaty
∙ Technics, datasets, AI and imagination
∙ Education, the university and para-academia
∙ Economics and value
∙ Literature, poetry and criticism
We’re also hosting a series of free festival experiences.
HIT LIST: Cool Devices Project (Room 404) —
A free makeshift cinema running each day by Hit List. Hit List is an archival project that blends all forms of media. Started by Nica Nervegna-Redd and Bella Besen in 2023, the project has established a space where all grades and genres are curated alongside each, oscillating between a platform for forgotten media and a celebration of the engaging, obscure, and often overlooked aspects of visual culture.
The Open Work & the Open Piano (Room G01, 1–4pm daily) —
An artwork and open installation by Nick Ashwood and Guests. After Cor Fuhler. Inviting you to play and explore the piano as instrument, object and intermedium.
Art Writing Workshop (Sat 13, Room 404, 10am–1pm) —
A free drop-in session with Jan Bryant. Limited spots.
Para-Academic Fair Space —
Books, tees and para-paraphernalia available throughout the festival.
FOPA Para-Parry-Party (Sun 14, Room G01, 6–10pm) —
Music by +SIX12 and projection installation by Spencer Rose.
See you at FOPA!
That’s a wrap! Thank you to everyone who came along and participated in FOPA this year. We are so grateful to all the presenters, contributors, and collectives who shared their work and thinking, and to everyone who came along to listen, participate, and learn with us. It felt genuinely meaningful. There are far too many great photos to share at once, so we’ll share a few now and more over the coming weeks.
Upon reflecting on the festival and the conditions it took place within, we’re conscious that this is a moment where resources seem increasingly scarce, institutions feel brittle, and academic and cultural expression is being censored. The threat of resources being withdrawn or withheld in service of neo-reactionary politics is no longer abstract, it is already happening (and probably only going to get worse). In this context, the festival’s para-academic, independent nature matters. That this project was supported and resourced largely by our comrades at Seventh Gallery, an artist-run space working precariously, without abundance, but with care and commitment, says a great deal about where meaningful cultural work is actually taking place. It speaks to the power of mutual support, shared values, and self-determined spaces to respond to the state of the world as it is: fragmented and uncertain, yet still capable of generosity, rigor, and collective imagination.
We wish everybody a happy and safe holiday season. We are all better together - more resilient, more creative, and more capable of shaping the culture we want to see. Much love!
FOPA + Seventh
We are excited to offer a number of free adjunct happenings over the course of the weekend. We hope you will come along get amongst some of it.
Drop-in Art Writing Workshop with Jan Bryant (Art Programme)
Sat 13, Room 404, 10am–1pm.
A casual workshop for anyone keen to explore writing about art.
Cool Devices Project by Hit List
A room of constantly streaming short films you can drift in and out of.
The Open Work & The Open Piano
An installation open to play 1–4pm daily in Room G01.
FOPA Para-Parry-Party
Sun 14, Room G01, 6–10pm
With music by +SIX12, a community-driven electronic music space connecting our city’s underground with the wider region; and visuals by Spencer Rose, who develops computational systems where simple rules are left to run and accumulate in their own way.
We are pleased to welcome Dan Ross and Guy Rundle for a discussion of The Immense Regression, Bernard Stiegler’s penultimate book, newly translated by Dan Ross for Pensées soignées.
For Bernard Stiegler, the question of technology is really the question of externalised memory, and externalised memory insofar as it makes possible education, knowledge, belief and dreams. For him, the crisis in education, in educational institutions, and in institutions more generally, is a result of new developments in the technics of memory, knowledge and dreaming. He did not live to see the rise of so-called artificial intelligence chatbots and their ilk, but with his penultimate book, The Immense Regression, just published in English translation, he gave us tools with which to understand this crisis, and to seek a path beyond this immense regression. We are living through a moment when two tendencies seem to be colliding and mutually reinforcing each other: the rise of so-called artificial intelligence, and the fall into a regressive age. Together, we might see this as the advent of unprecedented levels of artificial stupidity. And madness. What do these tendencies have to do with each other? What does the work of the late philosopher Bernard Stiegler have to tell us about this question? And at a time of rising nationalism, xenophobia and related phenomena, what role does locality have in any future politics?
Daniel Ross is the author of two books, most recently Psychopolitical Anaphyalxis (Open Humanities Press), the co-director of the film, The Ister, and the translator of many books by Bernard Stiegler, most recently The Immense Regression.
Guy Rundle is co-ordinating editor of Arena, and has worked as a journalist, TV producer and stage writer. His most recent book is Red, White and Blown: Is America a Cult? (Hardie Grant)
We are excited to welcome George Vassilacopoulos to FOPA, who will be discussing (and launching!) his new book - A Genocide Alphabet.
This work is informed by a sense that the times call for minimalist thinking about ontological truth: the minimal truth of an absolute criminal being. It holds that those of the West/Europeans are being asked to give a frank account of themselves by those who already know them infinitely more intensely than they may know themselves, namely the sovereign peoples whose lands remain occupied. For the occupiers, to be as (self-)knowing through and in response to this call is to receive the imperative, ‘Think with your being as fully exposed to our being.’ It is fundamentally to face the question, ‘You are the bearers of criminal being. Who are you?’ The book invites the reader to respond to this question by following the colonising movement of modern western proprietary being and exposing the concealment of its criminality.
George Vassilacopoulos was born in Greece and migrated to Australia in 1974. He taught philosophy at La Trobe University (Melbourne).
We are pleased to welcome the Platonic Academy back to FOPA this year, for a session with Bernie Lewin looking at Why Universities Will Never Teach Platonism.
The modern state-sponsored institution of research and higher education is often labelled “The Academy” and yet the ethos of the modern Academy has drifted so far from the ethos of the original Academy that the latter now appears thoroughly anti-Academic. This lecture will explain Plato’s approach to academic research and why it would be foolish to expect that Platonic philosophy would ever be taught in the universities of our day.
Bernie Lewin is a founding director of the Platonic Academy of Melbourne. He has published widely in the history of science, including on the Platonic foundations of mathematics. Enthusiastic Mathematics: Reviving Mystical Emanationism in Modern Science is an historical introduction to Platonic science published by the Academy in 2018.
We are pleased to welcome Mongrel Matter back to FOPA this year.
What does <para> in para-academia stand for? By analogy with "paranormal" (e.g. paranormal servitude/writing), we expect something greater than the extraordinary, right? An event verging on the supernatural (in relation to formulaic academia); let us see, let us forget, but in short, Mongrel Matter are not interested in leadership. Mongrel Matter are not sure if it's the Festival of Para-Academia or the Para-Festival of Academia that will kindly host a prime time session in their latest work in demonstrous philosophy… Please join us!
Mongrel Matter are Not Academics, Not Artists, Not Writers, Not Musicians, Not Filmmakers but we engage with all these things. All of these titles and bios are making our vision blurry and our decisions hurried.
We are pleased to welcome Dr Tim Thornton from the School of Political Economy to FOPA, for s discussion on teaching Political Economy Outside the University.
In no other discipline do students around the world so regularly rebel against the content of their instruction than in the field of economics. This is due to the overly narrow nature of the economics curriculum which students generally find to be dull, difficult, and most of all, of very limited use to understanding the economy, or the world in general. The remedy for this parlous situation is to introduce intellectual pluralism and interdisciplinarity into the curriculum. As will be explained, this broader and richer approach is best described as ‘political economy’ rather than ‘economics’. Given ongoing resistance to reform within universities, the School of Political Economy (SPE) was established in 2019 to offer the type of economics education that universities should be offering. The presentation looks at SPE’s development thus far and considers the extent to which it might offer a general template for undertaking tertiary education outside the university system.
Dr Tim Thornton is The Director of the School of Political Economy, Melbourne, Senior Research Fellow at the Economics in Context Initiative at Boston University and Senior Research Fellow at the Global Development Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.
We are pleased to welcome Brendan Casey and David Motamed for a session looking at John Forbes as Prose Writer and Critic.
This session revisits ‘Language at the Edge’, an unpublished talk by poet John Forbes (1950–1998), whose wit and intelligence came to define a generation of Australian poetry. Drawing on this text, and the forthcoming collection Life’s No Joke: Selected Prose, editors Brendan Casey and David Motamed explore Forbes’s work as a prose writer and critic, his reflections on poetry’s institutional and political entanglements, from the avant-garde ferment of the 1970s to the academic consolidation of the 1990s. When language drifts too close to the institutions, Forbes warns, it starts to mistake safety for meaning. Through a reading and discussion, the session traces Forbes’s humour, his resistance to professionalisation, and his continuing challenge to how we value poetry.
FOPA is happening this week! We kick off Friday morning and run through Sunday evening.
Separate tickets for Days 1, 2, and 3 are available now. Link in our bio.
We are pleased to welcome Remy Johnson and Phoebe Gawin for a session looking at Costal Trade.
The occupation of Australia’s borders are clearly defined by the coast and defended at all costs. Remy Johnson will present on the sea cucumber (trepang) trade between First Nations Australians and the Makassan people of Indonesia. This uncovers pre-capitalist trade practices prior to European occupation of Australia, and a space of cultural as well as economic exchange. The Australian coast has been reduced to a deindustrialised lifestyle destination, setting the infrastructure for a highly consumer based surf culture and tourism industry. Most of the population of Australia live along its coastlines, where the highwater line demarcates crown land from private property. As climate change takes effect, we find king tides pull parts of that private property into the sea. On the border of Collaroy and Narrabeen beaches on Sydney’s Northern Beaches is a particularly dramatic example, where a co-funded sea wall was built. Phoebe Gawin critically assesses the legal implications of restoring these property lines, which draws into focus broader issues in Australia’s speculative real-estate market.
