ACE x MUD
Co-presenting with our friends at MUD, over the past 12-week semester, ACE worked with three bachelor of Visual & Contemporary Arts students, Isabelle Szczotka, Tayer Stead and Isla Hannan Francis. The outcomes of their experiences have been compiled to shape this month’s MUDLETTER. They were provided hands-on experience working on delivering the ACE program and each student undertook independent research, drawing from ACE’s history and archives to shape their concept or question. This culminated in reflections on community, archive, the role of art galleries, and accessibility.
Editor's Note
In this edition of the MUDLETTER we have stepped closer to defining the elusive role of a “meta-editor” or “meta-curator”. One that works to bring people together in new and unexpected configurations; creating spaces for creativity, cooperation, and of course the timely demise of neo-liberal utopianism. In this role, since March 2021, MUD continues to create spaces for the material and spiritual flourishing of arts and culture in Adelaide. We put on gigs, parties, workshops, and residencies. We are a field of relations that is geared towards promoting improvised and experimental performances and believe that parties and collectives are vital and legitimate modes of knowledge making.
By creating counter-spaces we hope to encourage a cultural milieu of difference. The so-called free market society excels at flattening and homogenising cultural work, producing enclosures, auto-cannibalising the digital commons, and reducing all value to multivariate regression analyses; culture is commodity, engagement is sales, interactions are data points, so on and so on. We don’t know the way out of this, but by making more live, co-created spaces, printed and online, where people can share, make, and blow up their practice, provoke ideas together, to be witnesses together, is something we believe in.
We have been publishing the MUDLETTER as part of our monthly events since October 2021. Helping explore the intentions of the events guest curators, along with providing a space for text, imagery, recipes and more from our local and national friends to be shared in a process-based publishing medium. That means publishing is viewed as a necessary step in the development and emergence of novel ideas and practices. It embraces the messy, accidental, wisdom of folk craft and rejects the neat, polished expectations of the managerial class.
So here is the ACE x MUD edition of the MUDLETTER.
It has been a joy to read and view the work and gives us lots of delicious ideas for our future efforts!
Thank you to Isabelle, Tayer and Isla for their contributions and their wisdom. To Grace and the ACE team for their collaboration, and thankyou readers. We hope to do more cross overs such as this soon.
Keep on loving one another.
Constantine Stefanou
Director, MUD: Improvisation and Extended Domains.
MUD is an arts and culture collective supporting trans-disciplinary communities of artistic practice across conventional and unconventional domains. Hosting monthly performance events that explore extended notions of music, arts, dance and multimedia at Ancient World, Adelaide. This is realised through unique guest curation each month, where we support curators materially and financially to devise and deliver individual and/or group performances.
