In 1983, the year of ACCA’s inauguration in a small cottage in the Botanical Gardens, a red dust storm hit Melbourne: a dramatic and unusual meteorological phenomenon that saw over 50,000 tonnes of topsoil stripped from Victoria’s Mallee and northern Wimmera regions and deposited across the state and beyond. In its current location, clad in rust-coloured Corten steel, ACCA is impervious to the elements – a quarantined gallery space, no windows, in which Bik Van der Pol have brought the outside back in, presenting an expansive field of red soil, latent with potential.
In his essay The Lifting of the Sky, writer Tony Birch introduces the magpie who lifts the sky that was suffocating the earth as a blanket. For Indigenous people, the future is in the ground. Both past and future are also present in the sky; the story of the lifting of the sky (together) can be understood as a warning for disasters caused by climate change, and the collective action that should be taken by everyone.

Letters to the Land takes inspiration from Plato’s text Symposium, in which a group of seven distinct thinkers converse on the topic of love. In ancient Greece, the combination of drinking and thinking drew people to the symposia.