Collingwood Yards hails itself as a response to Australia’s crisis of affordable arts space. But is it as simple as taking some idle buildings, polishing them up and calling it an arts district – or is there a muddier question of sincerity?

Back in Melbourne, when friends ask How’s your French? I say that I sit down to my French class each week, and I can get through my chores. I can check for my allergens on packaging. I can read menus at a bistro and signs on the metro. At the beach, I understand children speaking to their parents about poisson in la mer. I understood the drunk man on a bike telling me about the bon chien across the road.

I spoke with The Cat Empire’s OG Felix Riebl (lead vocals, percussion) on beckoning in a new era.

Their relationship didn’t only exist in abstraction and contrast, though. Friendships form through mutual real-life experience. Even professionally, creative networks ruminate shared pain points to fuel bodies of art. Warhol-Basquiat’s artworks culminate in this phenomenon, emerging from their base in New York, USA. Pieces like Ten Punching Bags (The Last Supper), honing into race, religion and the AIDS epidemic, give insight into their joint criticality of peripheral cultural issues.

As Uncle Archie Roach listened to Kee’ahn perform their soulful Better Things, he closed his eyes and cried.

It was the fourth episode of his Youtube series Kitchen Table Yarns, a program initiated to support emerging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander singer-songwriters, released in late 2021.

I ‘hmm’ an eyebrow scrunch whenever I hear the term Outsider Art. I’m not alone – not many like this term anymore. It hardly captures the complexity of belonging, determines any true social peripheries around art, or reflects contemporary language on marginalisation in the arts. But it holds on even without fanfare. When it pops up, I flip between discomfort to confusion, thinking: who’s driving the conversation (it’s certainly not the artists)?