You Are Here Festival

 

You Are HereAs a part of an ongoing guest blog series with festival directors and organisers, we connected recently with the team at You Are Here, a curated festival that exists to showcase the best of Canberra’s diverse independent and experimental arts and culture.

Kicking off today and running from 13 March to 23 March, You Are Here presents an eclectic and diverse range of art forms, staged across multiple venues and over several days. Quickly emerging as one of the most interesting multi-arts festivals, we were pleased when the festival team Adelaide Rief, Sarah Kaur, Vanessa Wright, Nick Delatovic and Andrew Galan – You Are Here Producers, took the time to answer our questions.

What does your festival see as the role of the arts in supporting (or otherwise) diverse representations of Australian culture?

Australian culture as a concept is admittedly amorphous and undefinable, being as it is a culture of exceptional diversity and divergence alongside a wealth of shared experiences and dreams.  And in this sense, You Are Here sees the role of the arts as being able to trace the shape of this strange and slippery beast of culture; for artists and audiences to spend time with complex opinions, ideas, disciplines and subjects without a need to reach any epiphanies or solutions but to ponder the possibilities. And in producing the festival, we seek to present art that avoids the barriers that can exist in traditional arts discourses, by using humour and a DIY aesthetic to draw in audiences who might not see the arts as something that speaks to them. In this way not only does the festival seek to explore the potential of art to be reflective of and conducive to diversity in Australian culture, but also seek to ensure that art is approachable and accessible.

The festival also draws heavily on the diversity of Canberra as a city, a place where artists will often be pursuing second and rewarding careers in conjunction with their art – sometimes leading to fascinating cross disciplinary work.  A place where the population cares about more than what happens on Capital Hill, a place of wealth and privilege as well as struggle and strife. In a city that is sometimes reduced to the national arts institutions, the festival focuses on independent art production.  We are an agile festival, we’re quick on our feet. We strive to reflect the arts scene in Canberra and that local and national issues that our artists explore in their practice.

Can you give us a brief overview of the festival and what it offers Asian Australian audiences in terms of programming?

You Are Here is a festival for and by experimental and emerging artists from Canberra or with a Canberra connection.  We seek to reflect and enhance the flourishing arts scene that exists in Canberra.  And in doing so we seek to pull back the curtain that the media and popular discourse seems to so frequently draw across Canberra’s vibrant cultural life. Experimentation and exploration are key tenets of the festival, and we seek to work with our artists to give them the room to experiment with new works, try out new approaches, take risks and to inevitably fail in the process. The festival also occupies unused city spaces, and repurposes traditional spaces both by necessity and by design, to challenge our artists and enliven Canberra’s urban environment.

The You Are Here program offers a diverse, experimental and thoroughly enjoyable selection of events that cross disciplines and in many cases invite participation from our audiences.  It is hard to define exactly what our program offers to Asian Australian audiences, as those audiences are as diverse as our program.  From an obvious perspective our program offers works from artists who hail from or identify with Asian cultures.

Malaysian born choreographer Angela Goh will be presenting her second contemporary dance creation for the festival The Exorcism of Megan Clune and Angela Goh. Angela has filmed herself dancing all of the moves she’s ever learnt to dance, and Megan Clune playing all the music she’s ever learned to play. The duo have then time-lapsed the footage into a digital and performative exorcism of what they know.

Zoya Patel is the editor of Lip Magazine and is curating a literary event for the festival Lip-readings, featuring performances from 4 women reading works about feminism and change.  Zoya was born in Fiji to parents of Indian heritage and is a staunch feminist writer and thinker who explores her Asian Australian identity frequently in her writing on her blog The Coconut Chronicles.

Heart Hand Home is collective of twenty multicultural women, both Australian and with experience of migration. The group are creating a “join the dots” interactive wall installation in our festival hub space, exploring the different ways we all connect. The women will be working in our hub space at various times throughout the festival, completing the installation and engaging with audiences to create their own personal join the dots on postcards that will form the basis of new future projects.

And finally, one of our festival producers Sarah Kaur migrated to Canberra from Singapore and has cut her teeth in programming for the Singapore International Film festival before starting work with You Are Here. Sarah has a strong focus on national and international partnerships between artists and the festival and in future years hopes to be able to facilitate more connections between the festival and Asian artists.

The broader program also offers events which seek to explore issues that speak to alternative voices, cross cultural identities, the global environment as well as the audience’s sense of fun.

The Canberra Zine Emporium is presenting the Zine Vending Machine in the festival hub space for the duration of the festival.  For a gold coin the audience can purchase their very own zine by local creators, made especially for the the Machine. Zines as a medium have a history of facilitating expression by alternative voices, sub-cultures and marginalised communities and in this way offer diverse perspectives on Australian culture and what lies within.

Who is Dani Cabs? is a series of performative video portraisits presented by Daniel Cabrera a first generation Australian of Latino background.  The work is driven by Cabrera’s need to understand his own identity and experiments with how the photographic portrait is a tool that constructs, rather than documents, a person’s identity.

Will and Charlotte: the future is a foreign country is a creative workshop presented by Eleanor Malbon that seeks to explore our ideas of the future.  Are they plausible? What are the other possibilities? Will our problems get bigger? Smaller? Morph into others? Will our solutions work? What is a solution anyway? An opportunity to explore what the future means to you, on a local and global scale.

Why do you think that these offerings would be of interest to Asian Australian audiences?  

It would be hard to assume that these offerings will be of interest to Asian Australian audiences, more than the other offerings in the program. But perhaps the offerings above, in some small ways reflect the artists own experiences of two cultures, their separateness and their interconnectedness.

The program also explores ideas that might speak to Asian Australian audiences as they reference broader global issues and international experiences, in particular those which resonate with groups who have been historically marginalised or have experiences of colonisation.

Do you actively seek representation from CALD or other historically marginalised groups in your programming committees/board/staff/volunteer teams?

An honest answer to this question is that we don’t.  Not actively at least.  With the same breath we would also say that this is a staunch aim of the festival, and one we hope to work towards with adequate experience, respect and sensitivity to the experiences of these groups.  We have to some extent sought to engage with other historically marginalised groups, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in some of our programming.  Maitland Schnaars identifies as Aboriginal and is performing at festival as well as developing two collaborations with other festival artists. Maitland creates hybrid performance pieces combining poetry, multi-media, visual art, movement and sound and we are excited to incorporate his perspectives and experiences into the festival.

Have you ever solicited or received feedback from CALD or other historically marginalised groups in terms of your festival? 

Not in an active or overt sense.  But one of our key series events this year is the You Are Here Postmortems – a series of talks with artists where we not only seek to open a space for constructive critique of the events the artists just presented to festival audiences, but also for the artists to offer comment and critique on the festival and their experiences of it. Hopefully through these forums and other possible strategies for soliciting feedback we will not only get an idea of what a diverse audience has found exciting about our program but also how, as a festival, we can include and represent diverse, CALD and historically marginalised communities.

Author: Eleanor Jackson

Eleanor Jackson is a Filipino Australian poet, performer, arts producer and community radio broadcaster. Eleanor Jackson is a former Editor in Chief and Poetry Editor of Peril and currently Chair of the Board.