Held alongside Love Letters to City, Lae Um's debut solo exhibition at Schoolhouse Studios, counterpose archives will host a letter writing workshop, inspired by the poetry of Jasmine Mans. This workshop invites participants to pause, reflect and write. Man's poem South 14th Street: For Sale, published in the collection Black Girl, Call Home, paints a vivid portrait of nostalgia centred around her grandmother's house – a home once full of life, now aged and hollowing. In this spirit, participants are invited to consider: what do we carry with us from the places we leave behind? What fragments of self, sound or silence remain when a door closes on a friendship, a family home, or a phase of life?
Participants will be guided through a series of gentle writing and drawing prompts that explore themes of memory, place and personal transformation. You are invited to write a letter – to a past self, a distant friend, a former home or a city – and drop it into Lae Um’s sculptural mailbox, a symbolic act of release and remembrance.
Rooted in poetry and personal narrative, this workshop is a space for reflection, release and return. It honours the emotional afterlife of spaces we once inhabited and invites us to consider how art and language can hold the complexity of departure, return and reinvention.
counterpose archives aims to create transformative discourses about art writing and publishing in Australia, centering intersectionality and self-defined agency through knowledge in practice. Rooted in an exploration of voice in art writing, this project serves as a platform for resource-building and professional development, challenging the cultural hegemony in art publishing. At the heart of counterpose archives lies the interplay between ongoing redefinition and adaptation of knowledge and practice.
Laetitia Um is a Chinese-Timorese/Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist whose work moves through heartbreak, longing, and transformation. Her debut solo exhibition, Love Letters To My City (2025, Schoolhouse Studios), marks a pivotal moment in her evolving practice. Rooted in dreamy clarity and hand-drawn simplicity, her work opens a contemplative space for processing personal and collective experience in an increasingly polarised world.