Zone #4 by Meagan Streader, Here, you can zone into a totally absorptive state filled with billowy organic shapes, soft lighting and evocative audiovisual-scapes
The Underbelly arts festival spread its artistic magic all over Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour last weekend. With over 100 artists working on thirty projects, it was a beautiful contrast from the island’s natural beauty and industrial history to experimental, innovative artworks and crazy performances.
Smaller than I expected, there were some pleasant surprises. The festival presented humans boxed in a life-sized video game, a painting that came to life, a sculptural installation of mussels, a zone with organic shapes, and a new sound environment.
Its purpose was clearly to stimulate the senses with explosions of colour, surprising sounds, unfamiliar smells, and mysterious materials to touch that made you want to explore.
“I’ve met you in a city that isn’t on the map” by James Brown, James Dalton, Lucy Parakhina and Dylan Tonkin
You could also choose to be part of the festival and participate in some projects, which is probably the best way to enjoy it. For me the highlight was the ambitious artwork “I met you in a city that isn’t on the map”. The project throws you into a city close to apocalypse and you have to make a choice about how you will live its final moments: will you riot, repair, explore, evacuate or remain?
“The idea is that people given these choices start creating a bit of an eco-system. You can see in there that these buildings have been built as new structures, destroyed and then re-built into other new structures. It’s like a coral reef,” said James Dalton, one of the artists who created the project with the collective Unhappen.
The idea was to stimulate the audience in a different way than art traditionally has done by giving them tasks and focus so they can create their own story through that experience.
“The idea of the apocalypse was something that we felt had very high stakes so by giving people simple tasks to focus on, we predicted that we would have this very fascinating flourishing system and story that we didn’t script,” Dalton explained.
The audience was clearly fascinated with all the possibilities and seemed to enjoy the experience of being in another world for few hours. Contemporary art can be unpredictable but that’s part of its appeal.
