Panic and Annihilation (or, Of No Relation): Artists Virginia Barratt and Frances Barrett In Conversation

Frances Barrett (b. 1983) is an artist who lives and works in Narrm Melbourne, whose recent work pivots around the modalities of listening and vocality. Barrett's projects take the form of immersive sound installation, live performances and video installation. Such projects include: *Cry* for *The National 4: Australian Art Now*, Carriageworks, 2023; *Meatus*, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2022; and *All Ears: A Listening Party*, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 2018. In 2019 Barrett was one of the recipients of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, a unique fellowship for women working across performance and installation. Barrett is one member of the collective Barbara Cleveland (with Diana Baker Smith, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley) who have presented projects at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Biennale of Sydney, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and Hayward Gallery. In 2020 Barbara Cleveland presented their first survey exhibition, *Thinking Business*, at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. Barrett was the Chair of the Curatorial Advisory Board for VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising, an event focused on queer practices presented by Monash University Museum of Art, Samstag Museum of Art and Ace Open. Barrett is currently a Lecturer in Fine Art at Monash Art Design and Architecture.

Virginia Barratt (b. 1959) is a trans-media artist, researcher, writer and performer living on Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide, so-called Australia. Virginia is writing a PhD at Western Sydney University in the Writing and Society Centre, and their doctoral research focuses on panic, affect and deterritorialization, explored through performance, experimental poetics and vocalities. As a founding member of the cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix, still active through occasional collaborations, Barratt has been instrumental in developing critiques around gender and technology over three decades. Barratt’s most recent works have been performed in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Byron Bay, Sydney, Helsingør, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Performing Arts Forum (PAF) and the Sorbonne in France, Humbolt University and Kunsthaus KuLe in Berlin. Barratt has been widely published, including in: *AXON*, *Cordite Poetry Review*, *Writing from Below*, *TEXT Journal*, *Banquet Press*, *Cordite*, *Overland*, *Plinth Journal*, *Artlink* and *Offshoot: Contemporary Lifewriting Methodologies and Practice in Australasia*. Barratt subscribes to the DIWO (Doing it With Others) approach to art making and privileges co-creation as a productive and resistant modality. Among others accomplices, Virginia collaborates in an ongoing capacity with Linda Dement and Jessie Boylan as boneDirt, with Francesca da Rimini as In Her Interior and as Swamp Writing with Ashley Haywood and Nick Taylor.