Storytelling Liberation is a spatial and conceptual installation that provides the setting for five films exploring feminist and anticolonial storytelling methods. Comprising powder-coated steel display structures modelled on whiteboards, a temporary library and wall-painted lettering, the work creates a learning environment within the gallery. Each display zone pairs a film with books and texts that expand the method explored in the corresponding collaborative video. The installation invites viewers to inhabit the space as readers, listeners and co-learners, transforming exhibitions into a site for collective study.<p></p>
NTRO Output Category
- Original Creative Work : Visual artwork
Place
Bendigo, Victoria, AustraliaVenue
La Trobe Art InstituteNTRO Publisher
La Trobe Art InstituteMedium
powder-coated steel display structures, temporary library, borrowed school chairs, wall-painted lettering
Photographic documentation: Christo CrockerResearch Statement
Storytelling Liberation (2025) is a major installation that spatialises the project’s proposition that storytelling might become an antidiscipline in academia and the arts. Designed as a modular constellation of independent display-viewing areas, the work provides an environment for watching five films that each document a distinct feminist and anticolonial storytelling method. Powder-coated steel structures, modelled on whiteboards and paired with borrowed school chairs, reference pedagogical space while also constructing a sense of autonomy.
Each display integrates a temporary library, extending the methods explored in the films through reading and reflection. The architecture of the installation functions as a social interface between film, text and audience, transforming spectatorship into collective inquiry. Through its design and accompanying public programme, the installation advances exhibition-making as a form of transdisciplinary research—foregrounding learning, dialogue and situated knowledge exchange as artistic form.
It enacts the Storytelling Liberation methodology through spatial, visual and relational means, producing a model for how art can host transdisciplinary collaboration and shared study. Presented at La Trobe Art Institute, one of Australia’s leading university galleries, the installation framed the films as dialogical objects, bringing different forms of art, knowledge-making and activism together in a shared space.Size or Duration of Work
Variable: consisting of 10 powder-coated steel display structures 1.8m high, 1.5m wide, wall-painted lettering 7m longAffiliation
Alex Martinis Roe, University of Melbourne
