Music—

Simona Castricum fuses post-punk, dream-pop and synth-wave, mapping queer relationships inside utopian/dystopian urbanisms.


Emerging from Narrm’s underground scene in the late ’90s, she has received multiple Music Victoria Award nominations for Best Solo Artist. Her Panic/Desire and SINK albums were long-listed for the Australian Music Prize. SINK also earned a 2024 AIR Award nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Release.



Signing to Dinosaur City Records in 2023, Simona collaborates to release music independently through her studio, Trans-Brunswick Express.

As a duo with drummer Anetta Nevin (Dianas, Cars That Ate Paris), Simona drives guitar over synths and drum machines. She’s played Golden Plains, Dark Mofo, VIVID, Sydney World Pride, and Melbourne Music Week, supporting Peaches, Drab Majesty, Lydia Lunch, and !!!. Her music has been remixed by Aérea Negrot, Chiara Kickdrum, and Various Asses, while she has remixed for Courtney Barnett, Cong Josie, Pillow Pro, and Hyrda Fashion Week.


In 2017, she formed SaD with the late Daphne Camf. Opening for Moon Duo in 2020, they released Saturn Rules the Material World (2021), their lone epitaphic offering, which earned a Music Victoria Award nomination for Best Electronic Act.

Broadcasting—

Simona is a broadcaster on Narrm commmunity radio 3RRR, championing intergenerational, genre-bending underground and queer music for drive-time.

A former DJ, Simona launched The Shock of the New—a trans dance space dedicated to electronic music in the late 2000s. She has helped to establish trans musical communities in Narrm, playing techno, house, and new beat across the eras.

Through clubs and radio, Simona has been a DJ on 3PBS and played at Strawberry Fields, Pitch Renegades, Confide, Fantastic, Hugs & Kisses, Pleasure Planet, Bunker, Death Disco, Gaytimes, Trough, Abode, Meccanoid, and Q&A.

Architecture—

Simona works in gendered spatial design, transfeminist methodologies, and design justice practice.



Simona explores transgender and cisnormative typologies, uncovering how architecture and urbanism shape trans experiences—and how trans people, in turn, reshape space itself.


Simona was awarded the University of Melbourne Chancellor’s Prize and the Melbourne School of Design John Grice Award for her Architecture PhD thesis, What If Safety Becomes Permanent: Architecture & Music as a Site of Transing. The research examined musical event architectures as active sites of queer and trans spatial production, mapping how these environments generate archives of affect and urban morphologies in resistance to a dominant cisnormative regime of administrative violence.

Simona is a member of the Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Gender Equity and Diversity Committee. In 2024, she received the inaugural Gender Equity & Diversity Prize from the Australian Institute of Architects (Vic Chapter).

Graphics—

Simona Castricum’s graphic design practice operates under the moniker SPRGRFKA, treating graphic design as spatial, tactile, and world-forming rather than purely visual.

Typography, collage, image systems, and layout are approached as inhabited structures, experienced at a human scale through proximity, repetition, and use, physically encountered in print or on screens.


The work centres on the reimagination of familiar objects and ubiquitous graphika. By using recognisable typologies and iconographies, SPRGRFKA conjures equivocal, queer readings within everyday media. Rather than inventing new symbols, Simona intervenes in what is already familiar, embedding difference into the visual languages that shape daily life.

SPRGRFKA also works at the crease of analogue and digital technologies, recovering tactile ways of sensing, making, and reading forgotten in contemporary media. Working across publishing, installation, music, and identity systems, Simona approaches graphic design architecturally: meaning structured as environment, with typography functioning as interface, voice, and spatial production across her architectural, installation, and musical practices.

Installation—

Simona’s installations explore the affective, tactile, and virtual conditions of transgender spatial production.

Her conceptual work has led to collaborations across exhibitions, installations, and performances, including Simply Irresistible (NGV Architecture Commission Design Competition), SINK (with Carla Zimbler, Arts House), WAYFINDING (with George Goodnow, Science Gallery), Who’s Afraid of Public Space? (with SIBLING, ACCA), and When Program is the Enemy of Function (Architecture Feminisms, AHRA/KTH Sweden).


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Images—
Portrait: Darien Gomes / Live: Duncographic / SaD w Daphne Camf: Billie / Strawberry Fields 2024: Edd Schlaghecke / Simply Irresistible w StudioBird: Patrick Hamilton / SINK w Carla Zimbler: Briony Jackson