ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

Concrete Archives Book Launch | Panel Discussion: Yhonnie Scarce & Lisa Radford with Vikki McInnes

November 4, 2024·59 min·3 clips

A museum search in Croatia leads to a family connection with Chernobyl and internment.

The room comes first. Before anyone gets into the book, the launch is placed on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung land, beside neighbouring Boon Wurrung and Bunurong, with respect paid to elders and First Nations people. The mood is serious. The introduction connects Concrete Archives with truth-telling after the failed voice referendum and with earlier ACCA work on nuclear colonisation. Then the talk turns to fieldwork. Scez and Radford describe support that did not require a finished outcome, which let the project begin by looking around, searching, and following whatever opened up. New York is the starting point. An exhibition on concrete utopia sends the work outward through travel, meetings, South Dakota, and conversations that keep changing the shape of the project. The archive does not sit neatly in one place. Landscape and place hold memory through sites, encounters, oral accounts, and people whose family histories appear without much warning. The project still has a working structure. Ten drops, limited funds, monthly rhythms, editorials, artworks, texts, and found archival materials give the loose inquiry enough shape to keep moving. Chance keeps cutting in. Students, contacts, and relatives of people linked to Maralinga enter the process, so the research feels found as well as planned. The talk keeps its rough edges. Speakers correct themselves, search for names, admit awkward phrasing, and leave the uncertainty of fieldwork in the story. Oral culture carries much of the weight. Near the end, the discussion turns to a site where shared stories, unexpected media references, and local guidance trouble any single institutional version of memory. The close is warm, with thanks to Lisa, the archive, ACCA, and the gathered audience.

As heard by us

A book launch that becomes a live conversation about archival method, with just enough looseness to feel earned.

This launch plays less like a formal presentation and more like a live argument about art, memorialisation, and truth-telling. Scarce and Radford move from acknowledgements and institutional framing into fieldwork, and that shift matters: place, encounter, and reproduction are…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A live arts launch where archive, place, and political memory unfold together.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from ACCA Podcast