Launceston’s former Tafe campus, a stately redbrick that has stood empty for years on a leafy bend of the Tamar River, became a Mona Foma venue in the same way many buildings in Tasmania do: locals chatting about real estate. As soon as the heritage-listed building was sold for $6.35m in 2021, word immediately went around the small city and reached the ears of the annual arts and music festival.
“We said, ‘Oh my god, it has been bought! This is an opportunity’,” says Emma Pike, the senior curator at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, which stages Mona Foma each summer. The festival, which has previously held performances and art installations in an old car museum, boatsheds, a former power station, an archery club and a hardware store, rushed to the Tafe buyer with a proposition: before any sprucing happened (a huge $50m redevelopment is planned), could they use it? Yes they could. For now, the daggy interiors remain un-spruced.
“Gentrification is so complicated, but with a festival, if you can intercept before any building happens, you get this magical moment with a space where you inherit the past but you can also add something else to its history,” says Pike, who is also senior curator at Mona Foma.
This is actually possible to do in Launceston: when she was working in Sydney’s art industry, “we were bringing international artists over to do shows and we’d run out of spaces to show them because everything was being turned into apartments and hotels. Everything was gentrified. But in Launceston there are a million spaces to interact with – and it is really fun.”
Mona Foma, the summery sister of Mona’s famous winter festival Dark Mofo, has run since 2008. Both events are frequently described as experimental or iconoclastic, but both feel less lofty than either descriptor implies. They are experimental, but in the brightest, most enjoyable sense of the word: the curated art encourages giggly fun as often as deep thought. Think a new national anthem put together by local children and a team of artists that you can only hear if you beat a robot at table tennis, or a daily choir that sings complaints about Launceston submitted by locals. (There have been hundreds; “a lot are about car parks and pedestrian crossings,” one choir member says.)
The move into the Launceston Tafe building means that this year’s festival is “completely different” to what was originally planned. The installation has been named Fantastic Futures, after the slogan on sun-bleached signs that remain on the walls. The retro interiors are much the same as they must have been when it was filled with students, except the classrooms are now home to artworks, performances and music. At night, the main courtyard is hosting free gigs from the likes of the Chills, Soccer Mommy and Kae Tempest.
Very little about the space has been altered, partly down to necessity – “I try to work with spaces as they are, otherwise it sucks all the money and you don’t get to spend that on art,” Pike says – but also because it is an interesting challenge. Which performance or film would work best in a former classroom, a board room, a kitchenette?
“I work in a museum – I can put most things in a museum,” says Pike. “But I am so inspired by spaces and it is nice to start by asking what would actually speak to a place, rather than throwing things in and forcing it.”
She is not above forcing people to come together, though: chairs and beanbags have been arranged in many rooms to encourage strangers to relax and interact, while water coolers have been scattered throughout the campus to encourage literal water cooler moments. Much of the art is also themed around humans coming together, and what happens when they do (and don’t), like Breakfast in Bed by US artist Kenneth Tam, who put a callout on Craigslist asking men to join a fake men’s club and filmed their bonding activities. And Jonathas de Andrade’s film Olho da Rua (Out Loud), which sees the Brazilian artist gather together 100 homeless people and ask them what they would like to do on film. (Answer: have a big party.)
And there is Prayer by South African artist James Webb, who spent six months researching all of the religious communities in Tasmania, from Christians and Buddhists to druids and pagans, and recorded their prayers. These play from speakers in the floor of a former tearoom, embedded in plush carpet; visitors are encouraged to take their shoes off and sit closely around each speaker.
“There is a lot of human tenderness and care-taking in these works – but there is also what happens when we don’t care for others,” says Pike. Like in Border Farce, a short film that follows Kurdish-Iranian heavy metal guitarist Kazem Kazemi, who shares how music is helping him recover from the trauma of being detained on Manus Island. Or Manapanmirr, in Christmas Spirit, a documentary by Yolŋu arts collective Miyarrka Media that shows how Yolŋu families have combined Christmas with their rituals marking the arrival of the wet season to make something else: a celebration that is both entirely theirs, and shaped by colonialism.
But even in the festival’s darkest works there are always glimpses of humour, a hint of a smile. “You can laugh at something very serious – it is critical to how we process things,” Pike says. “Laughing helps you take a breath.”
Fantastic Futures is running until late Sunday night; entry is free but registration is encouraged (some walk-ins are possible). Mona Foma continues in Launceston, then Hobart, until 26 February
