Co-founders Clem MacLeod and P. Eldridge bring their open-access learning program, The Compost Library, to Australia with the aim of helping people discover how to reap the personal, social, and political benefits of reading and writing for mental well-being.

On this special occasion, we find inspiration in local and international texts by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, and more; confronting ideas of decolonisation in our creating writing, storytelling and gathering. During the session, we invite participants into discussion about these texts and together attempt writing prompts to inspire our creative practices.

With a distinct focus on tender participation and co-creation, The Compost Library provides space for people to gather, share, listen and collectively imagine literary futures. During the course, Worms will have a popup in-gallery shop where you can buy merch, magazines and books.

Tickets are $10 each with a capacity of 35 people. If you want to attend but have difficulty meeting the ticket cost, please reach out and we can consider your individual circumstances on a case by case basis: compost@worm-s.com.

[Book Tickets Here]

The Compost Library acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land upon which we make and facilitate our work, the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people and their neighbours, the Boonwurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures; and their Elders past and present. We acknowledge the fact that sovereignty was never ceded and that Aboriginal people are Australia’s first storytellers.

This curated film program is anchored in Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon’s often-misunderstood and overly read essay Concerning Violence from his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. For this season, we have curated films that engage with Fanon’s work in the spirit he intended - not as an endorsement of violent action, but as a confrontation of the processes that drive the colonised to employ violence. This season includes seminal films such as The Battle of Algiers, one of cinema’s great political masterpieces, which charts the Algerian national liberation movement from its beginnings in 1954 through to independence in 1962. Also featured is Embrace of the Serpent, a visually stunning work filmed on 35mm in the Amazon, set against the violent backdrop of the colonial rubber trade. Dulce Fernandes' film essay Tales of Oblivion by offers a meditative reflection on the physical and cultural remnants of colonial atrocities in our present landscapes  - a 15th-century turned car park and minigolf course, museum artifacts - capturing the haunting echoes of the horrific trade in human beings.

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Thursday, 30 January Two Laws (1982) 2h 10m

Thursday, 6 February Embrace of the Seprent (2015) 2h 5m

Thursday, 13 February 2025 Tambaku Chaakila Oob Aali (1982) 25m and Born in Flames (1983) 1h 30m

Thursday, 20 February 2025 Human Being (إنسان / Insan) (1994) 27m and Talking About Trees (2019) 1h 30m

Thursday, 27 February 2025 Fantastic Planet (1973) 1h 12m and Contos do Esquecimento / Tales of Oblivion (2023) 1h 2m

Thursday, 6 March 2025The Battle of Algiers (1966) 2h 1m

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During the summer holidays of 2024/25, we ran a six-week, practice-led course titled Sapphic Reading and Writing, created for sapphic writers and artists. This project drew inspiration from the Women’s Art Register archive, housed in the Richmond Library. Seventh gratefully acknowledges the support of Lesbians Incorporated (LInc), whose funding made this project possible.

The project culminates in the release of this chapbook, paired with a deconstructed and extended version displayed across the walls and spaces of Seventh's galleries. Spilling out from the white cube and the blank page into various unpublishable forms, participants’ interconnected works explore themes such as queer time, space, and architecture; failure, drafting, and incompleteness; the layered roles of archives, memory, and visibility; sapphic love, friendship, and fate; bodies, sex, and the senses; and the complexities of language, labels, identities, and genres. Together, these works form a chaotic, messy, and queer takeover of Seventh, creating an ephemeral archive-in-space.

We are excited to present the printed component of this project. The rest continues to exist in queer time: in personal archives, in memory, and beneath the layers of white paint that accumulate on the gallery walls.

Join us for the publication launch and experience the gallery’s ongoing transformation!

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Expanding the Field presents a series of public banners that consider the intersections of public space, symbology and collective memory of the Citizens Park site. I have used drawing, camera-less photography and digital design to reimagine the idea of civic belonging and to playfully question ideas of identity and connection to place. I have captured ephemeral moments and unstable traces of public life through documenting direct encounters with the park's textures and temporal qualities, along with elements of archival material and lines of sight from the park. Through processes of deconstruction, tracing and reconfiguring, I have applied features of the coat of arms of the Corporation of the City of Richmond with references to the history of the site as a place of trade, leisure and mutual exchange. Expanding the Field invites viewers to reconsider how banners (and flags), traditionally instruments of proposed civic identity and classification, might instead become vehicles for exploring the fluid, overlapping territories of public space, identity and shared memory.

Famam extendere factis
et mon droit
Spread the word of the facts
and my right

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