|
March 2, 2010
I arrived back in Adelaide to discover that the Fringe Festival is in full swing. It has its own Flickr group and blog to inform those like me who have little idea of the events and happenings around the city.
The events that interest me are Street Dreams that is part of the DIY artist run festival and Renewing Adelaide. My reason is that it is nigh on impossible to legally set up an artist or community led space in the city centre on an ongoing basis in Adelaide, which lacks a vital urban artistic culture. Yet there are a lot of empty space in the city and those spaces make the city feel dead, especially when they remain empty for a period of years.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, street art, Flinders Street, Adelaide, 2010.
Adelaide like Newcastle is a ‘doughnut’ city –a city that lost their overnight populations and thus have a huge suburban belt but little city life with its sense of a lack of artistic community in the city centre, being isolated and bored with little option but to move to Melbourne.
The Renew Adelaide people---- Brigid Noone and Ianto Ware---are attempting to revitalise the city by filling the plethora of empty shop spaces with artist and community run initiatives. There are comparable projects being run overseas and there’s a strong history of artist run spaces taking over disused or underused urban areas. They say that a doughnut city is:
The doughnut phenomenon is partly about the volume of empty space in the city, partly about the overnight population but moreover it describes whether a city has held its place as a regional cultural centre. Cities are, by definition, cultural hubs. If they’re not, they’re just glorified suburbs. Unlike Newcastle, Adelaide has succeeded in maintaining its day time life but after 5 PM on weeknights they look exactly the same – empty.
A ‘cultural hub’ doesn’t shut down when the office workers leave. Adelaide lost a lot of its inner city life in the sixties and seventies due to suburbanization and the growth of suburban malls. The Renew Adelaide people add that:
A city that loses its sense of cultural and community life after 5 PM and replaces it with a weekend suburbanite drinking culture is less safe, less inclusive and less appealing to tourists, students and everyone who doesn’t like throwing up and getting in fights.The absence of support for artist run spaces and small arts production groups [means] that the volume of micro events in Adelaide is staggeringly low.
The end result is that, whilst the Fringe might make Adelaide amazing for a month, the rest of the year the city has a lot more in common with Newcastle than Melbourne, Sydney or even Brisbane and Perth.
These considerations are important because DIY festival refers to “Read/Write” culture in which ordinary citizens “read” their culture by listening to it or by reading representations of it, then add to the culture they read by creating and re-creating the culture around them. They do this re- creating using the same tools the professional uses. So we have a mixing, matching, and merging of visual and musical traditions taken from various sources.
|
There is an article on the Renew Adelaide project by Peter Drew in the February issue of Adelaide Review. He says:
A grassroots, small-scale community culture is a DIY culture that is quite different to the corporate professional one that makes us simple consumers of cultural and artistic content.