Brief encounters
Tasmania’s Mona Foma explores the possibilities of a decentralised festival, offering hope in the fractures of modern life.
Even at 9.45am on a Friday, Cataract Gorge, a ridiculously picturesque tourist destination on the South Esk River, is crowded. Five minutes’ drive from the centre of Launceston in plipatumila Country, it features bush-clad mountains louring over lakes, dramatic basalt rock formations and white riverlets running over boulders. There’s a choice of walking tracks, a swimming pool and a chairlift for those who want to admire all this natural beauty from above.
I’m not here for the views. This year Cataract Gorge is one of the venues for Mona Foma, Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art’s annual summer festival. With about half-a-dozen other art pilgrims, I’m searching for the Fairy Dell, where this morning’s performance will be held. After a few false starts along different paths, we find our way at last to a Victorian rotunda incongruously surrounded by European plants such as rhododendrons. Nearby is the Fairy Dell, a small amphitheatre nestled in the hills where an attentive audience is sitting on the flat ground in the centre. The sides have been reinforced by walls of stone and at one end is a stone stage.
It’s the kind of place that makes you think of the poetry of Bernard O’dowd or Norman Lindsay’s dryads cavorting among eucalypts, the early cultural nationalism that attempted to populate the Australian landscape with European myth. That work inevitably devolved into kitsch: all it could ultimately do was signal its own lack of rootedness as a colonial imitation of something unattainable, a classical arcadia stamped on a map of massacre and dispossession.
Framed by a dramatic backdrop of ghost gums and tree ferns, musician Reuben Lewis is performing for the series Morning Meditations, which features different artists each day. Some audience members are doing yoga, although I find Lewis’s music, for all the soothingness of its electronica droning, is not quite the stuff of New Age mindfulness. A mixture of various samplings and live trumpet, the work is a meditation on embodied memory and includes fragmentary voice recordings that hint at trauma. At one point we hear laughter, but it is the laughter of “pain and confusion”; there is a conversation about traumas of childhood and age and a poem about the shadows and pain of love, which is serenaded by a nearby kookaburra. With its subterranean fractures and slippages, Lewis’s work feels strangely appropriate to its setting.
It also signals that Mona Foma is a different kind of arts festival, built on the idea of encounter and decentred like a music festival. At the core of Launceston’s program – the festival also continues in Hobart – is the decommissioned Old Tafe building in
Launceston’s REUNIÓN district. The building is a block-sized, double-storey complex that has been temporarily transformed into a hub before it undergoes a $50 million transformation into an “art hotel” with residential apartments. Concerts with bands such as The Chills, I Hold the Lion’s Paw and Soccer Mommy are held in the central courtyard during the evening, and during the day the curious can explore the closed rooms around the periphery that house “Fantastic Futures”, a fascinating selection of visual artworks.
This becomes a genuine adventure, since you don’t know until you open the door what you will find. Some works – such as Robin Fox’s Hyperbolic Psychedelic Mind Melting Tunnel of Light, in which audience members operate laser lighting with a joystick, or Terrapin’s Anthem Anthem Revolution, which involves playing ping-pong – are interactive and attract queues of people.
Among the most powerful videos is graphic artist and musician Safdar Ahmed’s Border Farce, which premiered at documenta fifteen in Germany last year. Across two screens, Ahmed and others recount the trauma of immigration detention, and its expression and catharsis through Ahmed’s death metal band, Hazeen. This music is at once protest, appropriation and catharsis; in the context of the gentler domestic scenes of cooking and recollection, it becomes a devastating indictment of the suffering inflicted by our border policies.
Another highlight is Manapanmirr, in Christmas Spirit, from Miyarrka Media, a collaboratively produced work from north-east Arnhem Land that follows the Yolŋu appropriation of Christmas rituals. Manapanmirr means coming together or joining, and here different clans of the Yolŋu people fuse Western gift-giving and Santa costumes with traditions about wolma – the thunderclouds that signify renewal – to create a new ceremony celebrating death and rebirth.
Kenneth Tam’s Breakfast in Bed is an investigation of masculinity in which seven very different men, recruited through online ads, participate in a mock men’s social club. In a bleak room lined with fake wood, they participate in a series of activities directed by an unseen Tam – they awkwardly compliment each other, or dance in a circle wearing skirts with bells on. In one scene that’s like the preparation for a ritual, they glue Cheerios to one of their number as he lies half-naked on a table, casually gossiping about their relationships with women. It’s absurd, faintly sinister and obscurely moving.
Among the conventionally ticketed events is the premiere season of Jenni Large’s dance work Body Body Commodity at the Earl Arts Centre. As its title suggests, this performance examines the inescapable commodification of the female body.
When we enter the theatre, the stage is covered with a mass of pastel-coloured foam offcuts of different shapes and sizes. At the back, sound designer Anna Whitaker