NEW ANNUAL / Pocketbook Poetry Response to Cavitation

Join Newcastle literary collective Pocketbook for an after-hours evening of poetry, listening and shared writing within Izabela Pluta’s Cavitation. Through invited readings and an open mic, poets will respond to places remembered, left behind, crossed, translated or transformed by environmental and human forces. Taking its cue from Cavitation’s fractured maps, displaced materials and uncertain geographies, Elsewhere Is Not a Place asks how language might locate an experience without attempting to hold it still. How does a place persist after we leave it? What becomes of memory when it is carried into a new landscape? Can poetry bring different times and locations into the same room? Audiences are invited to contribute to a collective poetry exchange. Using fragments of maps, coordinates and images as prompts, write a short response to a place that has changed, disappeared or remains vivid in memory. Selected contributions will be read throughout the evening, forming a temporary geography shaped by many voices. You are welcome to perform, write or simply listen. OPEN-MIC PARTICIPATION Open-mic places are limited to 10 readers, with up to 3 minutes per reader. ABOUT POCKETBOOK Pocketbook is a grassroots, not-for-profit creative collective rooted in Newcastle’s literary and arts community. Emerging from a student-run open mic, the group now supports and platforms local writers and visual artists across the Hunter through publishing, events, and collaborative projects. Pocketbook exists to fuel emerging voices and actively sustain the creative future of our Steel City. Image: Pocketbook Poetry Evening, 2026, The Lock-Up, Muloobinba/Newcastle. Courtesy Pocketbook and The Lock-Up. Photograph by Ella Grace Paterson. Cavitation and Cavitation: Breathing Ocean are major commissions initiated and led by The Lock-Up, Newcastle, and presented in partnership with New Annual 2026. Izabela Pluta has been awarded a Creative Australia Visual Arts Major Commission grant through the international co-commissioning partnership of The Lock-Up and TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Poland. The Lock-Up and this project are supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, Create NSW, and New Annual 2026. Collaborators and project partners include the Australian Tapestry Workshop; Adam Hulbert, sound artist, composer, researcher and performer; cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis; Ocean Seagull; Tangaroa Blue Foundation; the Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences; Hunter Gatherer Network; Event Engineering; Heritage Stoneworks at the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure; and AX Interactive. Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.