For those who know Hobart’s Dark Mofo festival for its gothic bombast, weird surprises and controversial headlines, this year’s festival – which closes on Sunday night – may feel a little different.
But after a programming controversy last year which led to public outrage, calls to boycott and an eventual apology, perhaps it had to be.
“It was definitely not the year to provoke, or prod difficult questions,” the festival director, Leigh Carmichael, says of 2022’s more muted program. “I am not sure I want to go through that again any time soon.
“It’s a very important festival now for the community and for Hobart, so putting that at risk … feels far more problematic.”
Guardian Australia spoke to Carmichael on Wednesday – a week after the festival’s opening event, the Reclamation Walk, brought a solemn mass to the centre of nipaluna/Hobart.
The walk was introduced to last year’s program as a First Nations-led response to the Union Flag controversy, but in 2022 it had grown, bringing thousands together in the icy wind at the Queens Domain to be welcomed to country through dance and ceremony by First Nations cultural performers.
Indigenous elders and knowledge holders spoke of patrula (fire) and layna (water), which would be carried from here to Franklin Square. We would follow them in honour of the Muwinina people, who were violently eradicated from their home during the genocidal Black War; and to reclaim the city for the palawa people still living in nipaluna today.
As we walked through closed streets, a sound installation by Matthew Fargher ricocheted off the city’s buildings, projecting “sounds of country from across lutruwita to nipaluna”. At the square, layna was poured into the fountain and the patrula lit, before an Aboriginal flag was raised. Afterwards, we were invited to a “First Nations takeover” of music at nearby venue the Hanging Gardens, before Briggs and Emma Donovan took the Odeon stage.
The Aboriginal flag continues to fly throughout the festival, looming over the statues of colonists at Franklin Square, which have been wrapped in bush-dyed shrouds made by children on truwana (Cape Barren Island). The Reclamation Walk’s co-curator and host, AJ King – a bigambul/wakka wakka cultural practitioner – describes the shrouds as an attempt to “obscure the trauma they evoke on a daily basis for Aboriginal people”.
‘We made a mistake’: the Union Flag controversy
Last year’s coverage of Dark Mofo was dominated by public outrage over a proposed artwork. Union Flag, by Spanish artist Sierra Santiago, called for the donated blood of First Nations people – and was deeply painful to many.
The work was cancelled, and eventually apologised for: “We made a mistake, and take full responsibility,” Carmichael said at the time. The owner of the Museum of Old and New Art which runs the festival, David Walsh, admitted he “didn’t see the deeper consequences of the proposition”. “I’m sorry,” he said.
But calls to boycott gathered steam, with staff complaints, artist cancellations and a public “Blak List” petition signed by thousands – including high profile First Nations artists Tony Albert, Reko Rennie and Brook Andrew. The letter spoke of a long history of harm between Mona and its festivals, and the First Nations community, and signatories committed to boycotting the organisation until a series of internal reforms had been made.
Crisis meetings were held. Late in March, the Mercury reported a leaked proposal to ditch 2022’s festival in favour of Blak Mofo: an event run entirely by Indigenous Australians. Blak Mofo was never committed to, but in May Dark Mofo announced a $60,000 seed fund for Tasmanian Aboriginal artists to develop work for future festivals, which would be managed by a First Nations cultural advisory group.
In the accompanying statement, Carmichael said he wanted his festival to support more Tasmanian Aboriginal artists. “This is just our first step,” he said.
It’s been a year since then. How much has changed?
‘We’ve still got a lot of work to do’
Blak Mofo isn’t going to happen. A Dark Mofo spokesperson said: “It was one of the ideas on the table in a brainstorm workshop, however it wasn’t entirely embraced by either the community, nor staff at Mona in general … [It] has been put aside for now.”
Details of the seed funding and advisory board are yet to be released, but the festival confirmed it is in progress, with the exact model being developed by a First Nations staff member in consultation with people in their community.
For now, Carmichael says, it’s out of his hands.
“By the time it’s announced, I would assume many people in the community will have participated in the process. But we’re not dictating the terms of that,” he says.
“Nothing will ever be enough to absolve us as a society of what happened here 200 years ago … But in terms of our response to Union Flag, we just want our actions to do the work over time. Then other people can decide if it was enough or not.”
Carmichael calls the Union Flag controversy “a failure on many, many levels and a mistake on many levels”, saying: “Whenever someone is hurt or traumatised, then there’s a massive problem. I accept all of that and take responsibility for it.”
But he acknowledges the good work that has happened since – and comparatively quickly, too. “I think we’ve made inroads and deepened relationships [with First Nations people in Tasmania and Australia] in a profound and real way,” he says. “We’ve probably made three or four years progress in a year.”
A lot of that work has been done by new hires, including two First Nations people who worked on the 2022 program: Dylan Hoskins, a Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti artist and performer who is responsible for the vast music program at the Winter Feast; and palawa artist and Blackspace founder, Caleb Nichols-Mansell.
Nichols-Mansell had been a public critic during the 2021 programming fiasco, saying Carmichael’s apology was “too little too late … the damage has already been done”. When his new position as First Nations cultural advisor was announced, Nichols-Mansell said: “This is a time for DarkLab and others to repair damaged relationships with the broader community.”
Carmichael says this year’s program involves more palawa people than ever: “If those relationships continue to deepen, then there’s something really powerful there.”
He calls the Reclamation Walk “amazing and profound”, saying it will be a “fundamental pillar” of the festival moving forward.
But not everyone came – thanks in part to Union Flag, and in part to a rift between members of the local Aboriginal community and the broader Mona organisation which goes back a decade.
“There were a lot of palawa artists and people that weren’t there,” Carmichael said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
‘I’m counting down the days to another incident’
Kaurna artist James Tylor – who started the 2021 petition against Mona, with Trawlwoolway palawa/pakana artist Jamie Graham Blair – is not overcome with hope.
“If Aboriginal people are happy to work with Dark Mofo, and they are having a positive experience, that’s a good thing,” he says. “But I’m not holding my breath – and I’m just counting down the days until there is another incident.”
As a 10-year-young organisation, he says Mona didn’t have the legacy of older, colonial art institutions: “It could have started from scratch and had a really positive relationship with First Nations people.” Instead, he says, the museum and its festivals have offended First Nations people multiple times in their short history. The open letter listed some examples, including a 2014 artwork taking the form of an Aboriginal DNA test, which the museum eventually removed and apologised for, and a 2018 Dark Mofo work involving artist Mike Parr being buried under a main road, which divided the local Aboriginal community.
The boycott may have prompted change, but Tylor says it’s the work of Hoskins, Nichols-Mansell and the First Nations people who continued to work with Mona that have the biggest potential to improve the organisation. They carry the biggest burden, too. “Those guys are really doing the hard yards … and they have had to do it in the face of a lot of scrutiny,” he says. “Those people are probably under a lot more pressure than Carmichael.”
Tylor believes some people who signed the petition would be happy to work with Mona again, particularly if they continue to make change. But he never will. “Each individual institution in Australia has its problems – but Mona just happens to be the most extreme version.”
A less risky program – but one with more meaning
After its cancellation due to Covid in 2020, and a half-sized program in 2021, Dark Mofo is yet to recover its former glory. Headline acts Jonsi and Moses Sumney called off their tours; the “debaucherous costume party” that is the Blue Rose Ball was cancelled due to venue struggles; the industrial art playground Dark Park hasn’t returned; and while there’s certainly plenty of big and weird video art – Bill Viola, Doug Aitkin and Marianna Simnett are highlights – there are fewer oddball and immersive venues than there used to be. (The 2016 program featured a funeral parlour and an insane asylum; in 2019, at Hobart’s government house, patrons were served cakes containing the blood of First Nations people – although this time in an artwork led by them.)
The festival’s closing weekend is set to be bigger than its first, with headliners Kim Gordon, Spiritualized and Perfume Genius, alongside annual favourites including the Night Mass party, the Winter Feast and the Burning. But the stunts, performative debauchery and late-night surprise kidnappings seem thinner on the ground.
“We used to push everything to its limits. It gets harder as you get bigger,” Carmichael says. “It’s easy to do a really wild club for 200 to 300 people; it’s much harder for 3,000, and it becomes a higher risk event … it’s just harder to maintain that edge and that scale.” And in the wake of Union Flag, he said, it made sense to “pull back” from the headline-grabbing and controversy-courting to “give everyone a chance to breathe”.
Dark Mofo’s arts program still doesn’t feature many palawa artists, but some of the most moving visual art is focused on the ongoing effects of colonisation.
At Mona, Robert Andrew, a Yawuru descendant, has created Within an Utterance – a high concept piece aiming to liberate lutruwita’s original languages, of which no living speakers remain.
Andrew collaborated with pakana curator Zoe Rimmer, Aboriginal linguistic consultant Theresa Sainty and Wakka Wakka man Luke Mabb, who took him to gather ochre, rocks and charcoal from country. With taut string, these elements are connected to a central mechanism that transcribes words that Sainty gave Andrew of palawa kani: a constructed, composite language of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
Based on colonial accounts of the various dialects once spoken on the island, palawa kani is, by its nature, trapped in the English lettering that appeared in records of the invaders. Andrew aims to free it; as the mechanism slowly traces each letter, the movement is transferred via the strings to the ochres and charcoals, which make unpredictable marks on 50 canvases that line the walls.
The words are not visible, listed or translated for the exhibition. Instead, Andrew hopes to “give these words back into the landscape and the country they come from”.
A few rooms over is Fiona Hall’s collaboration with AJ King, who took his family and local community out to burnt-out Tasmanian logging coupes to harvest stone and wood from the ruins. Titled Exodust: Crying Country, the installation also features the voices of First Nations people from lutruwita and abroad, speaking of country, family and culture.
It’s the second time King has worked with Hall, who gave her program space over to him and his community after the 2021 controversy, for a work titled Home State Nipaluna.
King had been outspoken against the festival, but he believes the organisation has moved forward in a “really clear” way since 2021. Nichols-Mansell and Hoskins are “doing a lot of fantastic work”, he says.
“You can either go, ‘right we’re not gonna work with people ever again, and we just go on our seperate ways’ – but no one wins. You don’t give an opportunity for people to learn, to build relationships.”
Looking forward five years from now, King hopes Dark Mofo continues making change. “A dream would be to have more First Nations people involved in the running of the festival – but ultimately that … the platform can play some part in making a difference for our people. If it does that, then I’ll be there every day of the week.”
Dark Mofo closes on Wednesday 22 June with the nude solstice swim. Within An Utterance and Exodust: Crying Country are on show at Mona until 17 October
Guardian Australia travelled to Hobart as a guest of Mona
