Writing in the Expanded Field Vol. 3:
Overlapping Writing

Overlapping Writing, curated by David Carlin, is the outcome of a writing workshop program conducted across the early months of 2021 as a partnership between ACCA and RMIT University’s non/fictionLab. Invited writers Des Barry, Anna Kate Blair, Alisa Blakeney, Sophia Cai, Kate Jama, Peta Murray, Diego Ramirez, Autumn Royal, Audrey Schmidt and Tina Stefanou participated in a fluid and responsive methodology overlapping individual voices with collective agency, writing with editing and publishing, improvisation with composition, and text with sound, image and performance. 

The program accompanied ACCA’s Overlapping Magisteria exhibition. Encompassing living organisms, kinetic installations and immersive assemblages, Overlapping Magisteria paid attention to multiple ways of knowing, sensing, feeling and interacting with the world. The works — by Robert Andrew, Mimosa Echard, Sidney McMahon, Sam Petersen and Isadora Vaughan — unsettle the lingering divide between nature and culture towards more complex realms of knowledge and experience.

Overlapping Writing took these exhibition themes as a provocation. Building on the discoveries of Writing in the Expanded Field Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (curated by Lucinda Strahan) and the ongoing inquiries of the non/fictionLab, participants adopted an experimental approach to writing in and through the spaces opened up by the exhibition, augmenting and disturbing critical and curatorial perspectives with material, poetic and playful ways of knowing.