What was once a commons for critical exchange has been retooled into a mechanism of brand management and stakeholder appeasement. Spaces for collective encounter – lecture theatres, designer study pods – now stand as ruins of past aspiration, made obsolete by digital delivery, casualisation, and efficiency mandates.
The campus, once a hotbed of communal learning and dissent, has been ideologically excavated.
Following theorists critical of what the university has become including Wendy Brown and Henry Giroux we suggest that a burgeoning class of middle managers and compliance officers has accelerated this shift, often indifferent to cultivating culture and creativity within or beyond the institution. And yet, into these spaces, where art schools still exist in the academy, students wander. Despite the hollowing, this paper seeks possibility in the emptiness, reporting on two imaginative, risky, and radically reflexive projects staged at RMIT University in 2023 and 2024 respectively: The Posthuman Lecture Theatre Hack and the Graduate Exhibition Protest.
These case studies in varying ways beg the question of what it means to make work in a space where critique is valorised in rhetoric but neutralised in practice?
They also concretise speculation as to how we prepare students not just to survive this contradiction but to actively engage it – treating tensions as possibilities rather than barriers? These questions underpin what it now means to study and act within a university that feels simultaneously overbuilt and directionless. In this scenario, as the academy grapples with AI, global conflicts, and its own eroding legitimacy as a neutral, non-committal and by inference apolitical and acritical entity, creative risk becomes precarious, precious and vital.
In this context, we consider the Posthuman Lecture Theatre Hack and the Graduate Exhibition Protest as gestures of what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘horizons of hope’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 156).
These acts disrupt the narrative of a future without hope, opening feminist and collective forms of protest and solidarity despite institutional constraint. Both occurred on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation.
The Posthuman Lecture Theatre Hack (2023) was a multi-phase intervention that reimagined a decommissioned 180-seat lecture theatre at RMIT. It began with a symposium featuring Rosi Braidotti and evolved into a student-led ‘hack’, with undergraduates exploring institutionalisation, gender, and race through installations and wall inscriptions. The final phase, What’s Coming is Good, transformed the theatre into a ‘relational speculative sea’ – the entire space painted blue, filled with performance, multimedia, and participatory works (Zhang et al. 2023).
Questioning ‘who and what the University is becoming’, the project reimagined institutional space through feminist and ecological lenses. Participants collaborated across disciplines – growing passionfruit vines that ‘took over the institution’, projecting interactive media, and staging sound interventions (Zhang et al. 2023). As demolition loomed, students altered the theatre’s physical structure, creating an immersive zone of what one participant called ‘pedagogical acts of resistance’ to the pace and instrumentalism of institutional time (Troiani & Dutson, 2021; Zhang et al., 2023).
The Hack embodied posthuman and feminist approaches, operating non-hierarchically, blurring distinctions between human and more-than-human actors.
It moved beyond binary frames of critique or compliance, aligning with what Natalie Loveless might see as an ecological and ethical drift, where knowledge flows between bodies and practices like water (2019). Keeping their heads above water the students dived in – establishing a novel mode of site-responsive research-creation inhabiting the university, by jumping off the risco (cliff) and accepting the rizq (gift).
The Graduate Exhibition Protest (2024) represented a more urgent form of intervention, where beyond nourishment, self-effacement from the usual spectacle of the art world showcase was an imminent threat. Initiated by 21-year-old student Elli Sheeran during the Bachelor of Fine Arts graduating exhibition, it responded to the murder of 19-year-old Isla Bell in Melbourne the month before. Around 30 students turned their artworks to face the wall, transforming the exhibition into a memorial. Another student, Alba Goodey Artacho, extended the gesture to include the names of all 85 women killed by gender-based violence in Australia that year. During the graduate exhibition the count rose from 85 to 86, tragically underscoring the protest’s urgency.
This collective act of refusal emerged informally, transforming a pivotal career moment (resisting the gaze of gallerists, critics and potential patrons) into a shared act of mourning and resistance.
As Goodey Artacho explained, the continuum of violence stretches from “sexist jokes, comments, anything that incites this idea that women are inferior to men” to its ultimate expression in femicide (Frost, 2024). In rejecting the format of celebration and visibility, these students foregrounded an ethics of disruption – where risk becomes less about personal exposure and more moral necessity to speak out, mourn together, and resist the silencing protocols of institutional life.
These projects did more than critique – they made visible alternative forms of knowing, being, and organising. If Franco Berardi (2024), in a recent interview comparing contemporary university protests and those of 1968, invites us to dwell on the impossibility of systemic change, the blue water of the hacked theatre and the turned canvases of the protest suggest another horizon. They embody Braidotti’s ‘affirmative ethics’, where critique is not read as negation, but a generative act of world-making (2019a).
The transformed lecture theatre emerged as a relational territory – a space that dissolved the binaries between thinking and doing, human and more-than-human, under the speculative glow of blue light.
The student-led memorial became a temporary autonomous zone, rejecting the academy’s corporate image-making and laying bare its ethical gaps. These were not isolated acts of dissent but sustained collective labours demonstrating resilience, resistance, alterity, and an embodied politics of hope. Following Loveless, they show how to ‘make art at the end of the world’ (2022) – not by escaping crisis, but by working within its emptiness.
A version of this text was first presented as part of the panel ‘The Academy and Radical Practice’ at AAANZ held at ANU in December 2024.
References
Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge, Polity Press.
Braidotti, R. (2019a). “Affirmative Ethics and Generative Life”, in Journal of Deleuze and Guattari Studies, vol. 13, no. 4
Berardi, F. (2024). “Sabotage and Self-Organisation”, in Ill Will, (May 7th, 2024), https://illwill.com/sabotage-and-self-organization (Accessed November 30, 2024).
Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos, Zone Books, New York
Frost, G. (2024, November 26). From artists to activists: RMIT graduates make heartbreaking tributes to Isla Bell at the end-of-the-year showcase, RMIT News, Melbourne.
Loveless, N. (2019). How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, Duke University Press.
Loveless, N., & Smith, C. (2022). “Attunement in the cracks: Feminist collaboration and the university as a broken machine”. Feminist Formations, 34(1), 272-294
Manning, E. (2020). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press
Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic
Troiani, I., & Dutson, C. (2021). “The Neoliberal University as a Space to Learn/Think/Work”, in Higher Education, Architecture and Culture, 9(1), 5-23
Zhang, B., Tomasetti, S., McCracken, C., Hillary, F., Hesterman, H., Harrison, A., Chapple, V., Corompt, M., & Tytler, C. (2023, November). A Posthuman Lecture Theatre Hack. Paper presented at ACUADS 2023 Conference: Thriving Futures [Online Conference]. RMIT University & Edith Cowan University. Hack, ACUADS 2023 Conference: Thriving Futures (Online) November 2023
Fiona Hillary is the Program Manager of the Master of Arts – Art in Public Space and Research Lead in the School of Art research group CAST (Contemporary Art and Social Transformation). Fiona is entangled in posthuman, feminist, new materialist thinking. Fiona has made and curated permanent, temporary, collaborative, performative works for a range of commissioning organizations.
Cameron Bishop (PhD) is an artist, writer, curator and Associate Professor in Art and Design at Deakin University. As a curator he has devised a number of public art projects including: Treatment (in 2015/17/23), Front Beach Back Beach, and Six Moments in Kingston, each in collaboration with David Cross. Ideas around place-making, and the body’s appearance and experience as a political, private, and social entity spur him make work about the shifting nature of the term public.
David Cross is an artist, writer and curator based in Melbourne, Australia. Working across performance, installation, video and photography, his art practice explores the relationship between pleasure, intimacy and the phobic often incorporates participation by linking performance art with object-based environments. Cross is currently Head of Academic Group Art and Design and Co-Director of PAC at Deakin University, Melbourne.
Main image: Posthuman Lecture Theatre Hack 2023, various artists, photograph Fiona Hilary