“Are you ready to come with me?” said the girl in the white jumpsuit, blocking my way on the dancefloor. “Are you claustrophobic? Prepared to do anything I say?”
It was 2015 and Dark Mofo was only in its third year. But having attended the two previous iterations of the Hobart winter festival celebrating “ancient and contemporary mythologies, darkness and light, birth and death”, I knew to rely on my safe word: yes.
“The safe word,” she said, “is ‘bananas’.”
Uh oh.
I was handcuffed, blindfolded and walked out of the party and into a vehicle that took off through the icy streets. There were others around me but no one made a sound. I was in and out of the car, marched around, and at some point my blindfold was roughly removed. I found myself in the only seat of a blacked-out, vacant van, where a person in a black gimp suit was writhing at my feet, wearing a video screen-mouth of ruby red lips singing a disco song. As we turned a corner, I was blindfolded again and five agonising minutes later, ejected back on to the street.
I looked around. No car. Just the girl in the white jumpsuit alone on the footpath outside the party. She handed me a Polaroid of myself sitting on equipment in a gym – the black gimp looming over my shoulder. Had that just happened?
Back inside the party I tried to explain to my friends. But … what?
I’ve been a guest covering every Dark Mofo since it began in 2013 – with the exception of 2021 when I was stuck in Victoria’s lockdown. Over the festival’s 10 years I’ve flown hungover in a hot-air balloon basket under Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale, marvelling at the “degrading and offensive” beast’s pendulous breasts swinging in the breeze. I’ve signed a waiver on a trestle table and walked into a room of impenetrable fog, to lose all spatial awareness in a hail of strobing coloured pixels blasting my sight – even with eyes closed. That work, ZEE, by Austrian artist Kurt Hentschlager, remains one of the most perplexing, frightening and elating of my life. It also put seven people in hospital.
In 2015 I cowered at Byron Scullin’s Bass Bath – a double-story tower of speakers in a pitch-black warehouse thudding a constellation of frequencies designed to ripple your insides. The following year a letter to the editor decried the festival for subjecting children to “a demonic and satanic culture”. In 2017 I watched animal blood trickle between the audience’s shoes, as Hermann Nitsch’s 150. Action unfolded into a mesmerising, three-hour performance of gore, nudity and intense physical ritual. That year it was the animal rights protesters who made the festival’s now customary headlines – although none blinked at the pig on a spit roasting at the nearby Winter Feast.
Other memories are softer: a singing helicopter dancing across a peach-coloured sunset, elderly performers striking rocks on Bruny Island at 4am in a woozy meditation on ageing, raving in a disused cinema, wandering an abandoned asylum strewn with mirrors and possum shit, wincing at hordes of nude swimmers plunging into icy waters at dawn, and consuming a heroic amount of negronis and $7 doughnuts while watching various big things burn.
All spectacular artworks of varying success. And all whispers upon which Dark Mofo built an empire, as it lodged itself as Australia’s most consistently challenging and rewarding cultural event.
In 2018, then 73-year-old artist Mike Parr entombed himself under Macquarie Street for three days. “If anything had’ve gone wrong,” said the festival’s creative director, Leigh Carmichael, on the night the bitumen was peeled back for Parr to emerge, “that’s it, the festival’s over.”
Looking down on the scene I wasn’t so sure. By then Dark Mofo had trained me to believe a man being buried alive under a road was business as usual. “Birth and death”, went the tagline. Risk was in the ticket.
But court risk long enough and boundaries blur. Parr’s work was intended to symbolise the “burying” of Australia’s violent history, both inflicted upon the convicts shipped here in the 19th century and the subsequent genocide of Tasmania’s Indigenous population. But Parr did not seek permission for the work from the land’s traditional owners, who were divided on its intent. Even its title, Underneath the Bitumen the Artist, shut out the voice it sought to represent.
That unsteady relationship between the festival and Indigenous Australia came to a head in 2021, when Spanish artist Santiago Sierra requested First Nations peoples donate blood to a new artwork in a “statement against colonialism”. Organisers initially defended the commission, even as some artists cancelled programmed work and thousands signed a petition to boycott the organisation until it made a series of internal reforms. Eventually the piece was cancelled and organisers apologised. Some called for Carmichael to resign.
He stayed on. But following the 2022 festival, Carmichael said it had “felt safer”. In part that was intentional. It made sense to “pull back” from controversy, he told Guardian Australia in the wake of the Sierra furore, to “give everyone a chance to breathe”.
The size of Mofo’s crowds were introducing a new risk too; in 2019 more than 100,000 tickets were sold, a 25% increase on 2018. “We used to push everything to its limits. It gets harder as you get bigger,” Carmichael said. “It’s easy to do a really wild club for 200 to 300 people; it’s much harder for 3,000. It becomes a higher-risk event … It’s just harder to maintain that edge and that scale.”
This year will be Carmichael’s last, before handing over the reins to incoming artistic director Chris Twite. The shift from a decade-defining run to fresh meat is an obvious turning point: will Dark Mofo return to its waiver-signing, blood-trickling mayhem, or has the neon red horse of risk been put to pasture?
I have faith. At the close of each festival organisers would invariably claim they didn’t know what the hell they’d do next. The next year, they’d have worked it out – and I learned to see the ebbs and flows of the festival as the natural collateral of curating chaos. Sure, 2022 may have courted less controversy, but as always it was the lowercase provocations that stuck with me: Marianna Simnett’s Blood in My Milk, a visceral video exploration of glum medical procedures; Celestial Bed, a futuristic sperm-donor machine accompanied by NSFW footage showing its successful use; and Meiro Koizumi’s Angels of Testimony, where a Japanese war veteran confessed to brutal crimes while young actors invoke some of his confessions. I wrote then that “the idea of being emotionally charred at Dark Mofo felt … gloriously autonomous”.
Because that’s really all the festival requires to succeed – an invitation to be alerted to a world outside the margins of our lives.
Bananas.
Dark Mofo 2023 runs from 8-22 June in Hobart, Tasmania.
