Another year, another series of reminders that Mona throws some of the best festivals on planet earth.
We have drifted into the venue, Detached, from a ballot and disparate invites to commune at a long table over the Boats gin, a project between Mona and Berlin-based Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh, distilled by Taylor & Smith.
This gin sits at the centre of a network of influences and traditions: Tasmanian, West African, art, music, cuisine, distilled into a series of events and experiences across Mona Foma 2024.
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I hear about the difficulty in locating West African botanicals, to find a route for immigrant flavours to a Tasmanian distillery and the Mona kitchens and finally our table, laden with food and drink and surrounded by strangers.
But, of course, the kind of people who throw their name into a ballot for a gin and gastronomy event are exactly the people who would buy those tickets, so the differences in our company are not great enough to be provoking.
We have mutual friends and mutual ideas.
Why we look to Mona
We often look to Mona for art and experiences that we cannot find elsewhere in Australia. Artists buried under bitumen. The machine that shits. A mingling of mainstream headliners, legends of the arts, newcomers, avant garde, multidisciplinary, uncomfortable, niche pieces and exhibits that sit somewhere between a gallery and a museum. It’s good to be provoked once in a while.
While Boats is exactly the kind of multifaceted execution that only Mona could pull off, the message of welcome and collaboration for migration and refugees feels softer and less fierce. While it brings to life these links across seas, cultures and tables, between art and sound and taste, does an audience in Australia perhaps deserve to be more challenged and reoriented towards uncomfortable discourse around our own track record at welcoming others to the table?
Uncompromising boldness
Boats is somewhat contrasted to the uncompromising boldness of Arka Kinari, the musical duo Filastine (Barcelona) and Nova (Indonesia) who travel and perform only by the wind and solar power of their tall ship. Ark, the vessel, and Kinari, the guardian of the tree of life. In the dark of the Hobart harbour, apocalyptic images flash across the sheet sails accompanied by energetic percussion and soaring, wailing vocals of a siren’s warning. Multimedia and shadow play and synth, it is a breath of fresh air, something utterly, wholly unique. Their boat is an action, a symbol and a stage for climate emergency, while juxtaposed behind them in the harbour a cruise ship mega-city looms from the darkness. The show is supplemented by educational tours aboard their boat, demonstrating sustainability practice and knowledge-sharing. Arka Kinari offers a call to arms and invocation of power. Real resistance. Uncompromising. Decolonising, where sea power becomes a way of reclaiming connection with the natural world rather than mastery over it.
Music in Exile
It’s hard to escape these thoughts of climate disaster in the festival, the blazing heat of a world growing hotter, when that selfsame beating sun paralyses us on the Mona Lawns for the afternoon sessions of Music in Exile. The beats and musical spirit drawn in from around the world that should infect our bodies with dance and movement instead washes over us gently as we huddle in the shade or swelter with hands wrapped around rapidly-warming beers.
Revelatory experiences
A whiplash back to darkness for Justin Shoulder’s primal, primordial piece Anito, a revelatory experience. I had forgotten how beautifully the human body could move. In a journey influenced by folklore of the Philippines, we are transported to witness beings that slide between categories: Human and post/prehuman, organic and synthetic, spirit and beast, cacophony and grace, intimacy and violence. Altogether the queerness of bodies made strange in an otherworldly space, feeling both profane and divine. Evolving, rhythmic, cataclysmic, and I leave feeling calm and exorcised.
The major headliners
For the most part, the major headliners of Mona Foma are old favourites, a program of homecoming or comfort and nostalgia.
Queens of the Stone Age have returned and are unsurprisingly spectacular, in full force on the Mona Lawns and in a rare acoustic concert at the Nolan Gallery. They deliver performances with the consistency and precision of absolute professionals and legends of rock and roll.
It’s a retrospective weekend of Australian classics, also. Darren Hanlon’s collab with TSO for Songs Are Made of Air reimagines his catalogue of songs with new arrangements by longtime friend, percussionist Bree van Reyk. The songs take on a bombastic swell and brightness akin to Sufjan Stevens’s ‘Can You Feel The Illinoise’, with a dreaminess that lulls us into soft joy.
Courtney Barnett’s gig also opens with a dream, an atmospheric post-rock audiovisual meander with collaborator Stella Mozgawa, before returning home with a set of her classics, true to life fragments of Australian experience.
Paul Kelly’s warm humility draws us together in a finale, and we sit together hearing all our favourite stories again. It’s like meeting friends again after a long time who have changed a little, but hold those essential elements we fell in love with, that bond of camaraderie, and they’re still, for the most part, the people we remember.
Incredible performers, yet still familiarity prevails
Big, small, fast, slow, Mona Foma switches gears and it would be difficult to place the overarching rhythm of the first weekend. It’s not smaller by any means. These are big acts and incredible performers, but by comparison with last year the festival feels comfortable, familiar, even nostalgic with these retrospectives and stalwart living legends.
Maybe I expect Mona Foma to do the things only Mona Foma can do, to shock me out of the usual and push me to expand my experiences, a full throttle challenge to throw me off balance and change my perspective.
But also, maybe it’s not about me. And maybe it’s good just to share good things that connect us, once in a while.
Mona Foma continues in Launceston, find out more here.
