Madonna Staunton, Collage (1976)
In October 2024, the Australian Government proposed new regulations that would see all future cigarettes sold in Australia bearing a slogan imprinted on the butt. Smokers will kiss, inhale, and touch the words “toxic addiction,” “poison in every puff,” and “damages your lungs.” Even after the introduction of dun-coloured plain packaging, it is the cigarette’s branding and visual allure that is deemed culpable for smoking’s continual chokehold, above even the addictive properties of cigarettes themselves.
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Madonna Staunton, Collage (1976) by Loqui Paatsch is featured in full in Issue 3 of Memo magazine.
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Helen Johnson’s The Birth of an Institution (2022) is a visceral vision of colonial power—an exposed white woman gives birth, not to a child but to the dome of the State Library of Victoria. Encircled by cold-eyed onlookers, she embodies both subjugation and complicity, raising urgent questions about the institutions we inherit.
Whether collaboration has a “future” raises a deeper question as to how collaboration can stake a claim on the future as such.
