REVIEW: MONA FOMA 2018
For Arts Hub.
Photo by Jesse Hunniford.
The Huffington Post recently did a review of festival lineups from the past five years, and found that only 12% of bands featured all-female performers. In a time when music festival bookers are being called out for overwhelmingly programming all-male, all-white bands, MOFO felt like a stride into the future. The stages brimmed with women, with people of colour, with artists singing in dozens of languages to a crowd who beamed back at them.
The theme for this year’s festival was ‘Protest’, and the politics of programming were fiercely visible throughout. Every staff member wore a shirt reading ‘All Are Welcome’ in Arabic. The on-site wine bar played music exclusively from countries banned by Trump’s Executive Order #13789, and sold popsicles in the shape of Trump, Stalin, Che Guevara and Pauline Hanson (we asked one of the staff whether the Trump ones were selling well. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Nobody wants to lick his face.’). The first thing punters saw on arrival from the ferry was a giant wall with a phone line direct to the White House comment line (overheard messages included: ‘It’s fair, it must be hard to pick up a phone with such small hands’ and ‘Mate, you’re an absolute twit.’). Posters around the festival stated, ‘MOFO is a safe space for people of all identities’ and provided a hotline number for harassment. And the usual festival carpet of plastic plates and cups was avoided simply by not offering them. All the food was served on enamel plates with cloth napkins, which punters dropped back to be washed and reused. Drinks required a $10 deposit for a MONA-branded metal cup, whose nominal value had people clinging to them throughout the festival. As such, come day’s end, the only rubbish left on the main stage lawn was a fine dusting of cigarette butts.
Arriving at MONA necessarily involves a certain sense of ritual – whether by walking the long driveway, flanked by vineyards, or catching the ferry, windswept, eyes fixed on the gallery’s rusted exterior. The descent down the narrow staircase from the building’s ground floor feels like crossing a threshold. One can’t help but feel a little tug of nervous energy.
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Full review online at Arts Hub.