The title of this seminar is ripped from a Wikipedia entry about space travel. The presentation has little to do with aeronautical engineering, and everything to do with diverting fixed orbits of thought and action, through multilingual and interdisciplinary collaborations. To explore these ideas, I draw on recent research projects co-curating the experimental contemporary arts program ‘Corps Celestes/Etres Terrestres [Celestial Bodies/Terrestrial Beings]’ with Dr Manuela de Barros as part of Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles’ NOVA_XX Biennale, and on-going collaborations with Dutch publishing platform, Amateur Cities.

Bio
Denise Thwaites is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in contemporary cultural economies, who is currently Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Canberra. Denise was awarded her PhD in Aesthetics through The University of New South Wales (Australia) and l’Université Paris 8 (France), before joining UNSW iCinema Research Centre as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She has worked in the contemporary arts sector at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Australia Council for the Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (all Sydney), alongside co-curating independent projects for the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), Artspace (Sydney), This Is Not Art Festival (Newcastle), New Beginnings Refugee Culture and Arts Festival (Sydney), and Next Wave Festival (Melbourne). Her research has been published in Cordite Poetry Review, Meniscus Literary Journal, Runway Journal of Experimental Art, Performance Paradigm, Artlink, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Culture, Theory and Critique and Derrida Today.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to DeniseThwaites_Presentation.pptx