This History Week join us in an event that turns history on its head – History Slam.
Special guest and MC Mama Alto will tie together, with song, seven punchy presentations of contested history.
Mama Alto is a gender transcendent diva, cabaret artiste, jazz singer and community activist. She is a non-binary trans femme person of colour who works with the radical potential of storytelling, strength in softness and power in vulnerability. And she’s bringing all this to our History Slam.
Slammers will present provocations that are lively, complex, sometimes uncomfortable and intimately revealing about the work and practice of being a historian, on topics including the queerness of being an unexpected outsider, the earth as an archive, the absence of women in museum collections, and First Nations resistance.
Grab a champagne at the bar and sit back in the comfort of the Museum theatre for an afternoon of history and performance.
The slammers are historians, storytellers and history-keepers. They are affiliated with one or more of Museums Victoria, Professional Historians Association (Victoria) and History Council of Victoria. These organisations are presenting the History Slam as their contribution to History Week 2018.
Program details and tickets are now available via Museums Victoria: click HERE to access the booking page.
A NOTE ON PRICING:
General admission is $18 plus a $4 booking fee.
HCV Friends receive the discounted concession price: $15 plus the $4 booking fee.
A special code was supplied to HCV Friends in an 'Alert' email on Tuesday 2 October. This enables them to get the discount. (Click HERE to sign up for the HCV Friends if you haven't joined already.)
ABOUT THE SLAMMERS AND THEIR TOPICS:
As a historian who works with communities large and small, Sarah Rood is well aware of the complexities of the past. She reflects on her own feeling of queerness being an unexpected outsider when working on one particularly personal history.
Amber Evangelista is a history nerd and curator who loves ranting about diversity in museums. Monica Cronin is a museum curator who enjoys plotting world domination. They will explore the absence of women in museum collections.
Lisa Hilli is a contemporary artist who re-enacts and remakes history through her practice. She is also an Experience Developer for the Te Pasifika Gallery Redevelopment at Melbourne Museum. Her passion for history is driven through finding Papua New Guinean’s women’s histories in archives and collections. Lisa will re-tell three similar but problematic travellers’ tales regarding women’s marriage customs across the Bismarck Archipelago.
Dr Caitlin Mahar is into histories of dying and pain. She is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Swinburne University and a researcher at Federation University. She provides a short history of dying in a talk titled ‘Gone’.
Paul Michael Donovan brings history to life at Federation University, History up Close and Coal Creek Community Park and Museum. His props, costumes and artefacts bring stories to the people. He brings to life the battle of the costumed historian.
In recent years, Dr Rachel Buchanan has been a magnet for matriarchs (Agnes Denes and Germaine Greer). Her new book, Ko Taranaki Te Maunga, is published by Bridget Williams Books, NZ. She’ll speak on conceptual artist Agnes Denes and the hottest archive.
Isobel Morphy-Walsh, a proud Nirim Baluk Woman from the Taungurung peoples, lives, breathes and sleeps her history and culture. In her presentation, Wiy-aa Monga-ngal-in Biik-ut (Fight to show love to country), she will examine how her identity, her very existence, is a challenge to the dominant narratives around Australian history.
