Curated Raimundas Malašauskas.
‘It is said that the voice rips open reality’. This is apparently the only utterance I had thought worthwhile writing down into the blank, A5-sized notebook I had been supplied with at the beginning of On Campus. I cannot recall who suggested this maxim in the course of the two-day program that took place at Monash University from February 14-15 this year. Otherwise the thin, ochre-coloured cardboard cover, bound simply around 400 empty white pages, and the few loose leaflets splicing the book as a commonplace materialisation of subjective potentiality, still carries the faint smell of a scent garnished by George Kara, a local perfumer participating in the event. Elusive, hard to place, struggling against the organic, it reaches out to trigger a memory. This olfactory key persists even as I thumb through the almost entirely vacant pages four months later. The rip, or tear, is a precise image for the staged nature of On Campus, which left me staggering over the expansive landscape of novel possibilities present in the conceit.