Practise Practice #2

Roberta Joy Rich and Santilla Chingaipe

Presented by Arts House

Thursday 18 June 2026
6:00 – 7:30pm

Tickets
All bookings are free. Let us know you’re coming by booking your ticket here.

Auslan Interpreting
Available on request – book by Thursday 11 June

Relaxed Space
Audience members are welcome to come and go as they please, be themselves, make noise, stim and respond to the work for the duration.

Arts House
North Melbourne Town Hall
521 Queensberry St,
North Melbourne

Wheelchair Accessible

Quiet Space Available

Assistance Animal

Auslan Interpreting

Aural Rating 100%

Join us for an exploration of archives as living, relational practice.

Our second edition of Practise Practice brings together artist Roberta Joy Rich and filmmaker/writer Santilla Chingaipe to consider how African stories that are often buried within institutional records and dominant histories are gathered and sustained.

Drawing on Santilla and Roberta’s research-led approaches to assembling diasporic histories through a process of reframing, and what Roberta calls “anarchiving,” they will share the methods that underpin their work. Their practices subvert colonial and linear understandings of African archives into material that is activated and interpreted to piece together a life. We then take a closer look at the practical methods of engaging with archives: navigating records, following narrative threads, informed by their practice research and lived experiences.

Practise Practice invites an artist (or two) to lift the curtain on how ideas take shape. From messy drafts and detours to the sparks that turned into something bigger, it’s the side of creative process often unseen.

Each session is part conversation, part demonstration. You might leave with a new question to explore, or a small exercise to incorporate in your own creative practice.

Light snacks will be available.

About the artists

Roberta Joy Rich
Roberta Joy Rich is a transdisciplinary artist interested in critical fabulation and anarchiving as processes for unearthing silenced and emergent narratives, and in doing so, the possibilities they conjure for Bla(c)k empowerment. With a focus on communal knowledge systems, alterity, fugitivity and socio-political histories, her projects explore resilience, power, memory, belonging and truth-telling, often drawing upon her lived experiences as a diaspora kaapse Southern African woman. Her practice utilises text, video, installation, photo, print, archives, satire and storytelling as platforms to interrogate constructs of race, gender, history and notions of authenticity. Roberta aims to deconstruct colonial modalities through her work, while proposing empowered sites of self-determination.

Roberta is has exhibited widely across South Africa and settler nation Australia exploring their colonial, historical and creative entanglments. Recent exhibitions include in every room; Campbelltown Arts Centre (2025), Lying Inside; Latrobe Art Institute Biannual Façade Commission (2024) and The Purple Shall Govern; Footscray Community Arts (2022), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2023). Roberta is a current Gertrude Studio Artist.

Santilla Chingaipe
Santilla Chingaipe is a filmmaker, historian and writer, whose work explores settler colonialism, slavery, and post-colonial migration in Australia.

Santilla’s first book of non-fiction, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia (2024), has received many accolades including being shortlisted for The Stella Prize and longlisted for the Cundill History Prize.

Santilla is a regular contributor to The Saturday Paper and a columnist for The Monthly.

She is based in Melbourne.

Details