Fantastic Futures
The exhibition title Fantastic Futures is taken directly from marketing materials found at the college which were produced to encourage enrolment in the 1980s. It speaks to a community’s earnest desire for ‘coming-togetherness’ whilst acknowledging the impossibility of artificially fabricating such a thing. The show features thirteen works across video, audio visual installation and performance from a diverse group of artists. Several works are created through unlikely collaborations and successfully generate new communities through their development, while others express the desire for but failure to connect and the ramifications of this. Tongue in cheek interventions performed by local community groups inhabit the site providing commentary on artificial, commercial, and politicised ideas of community, from corporate team building to defunded community centres, place-making policies, and failed education systems.

– Emma Pike

Mona Foma has no permanent physical home. The festival functions as a site-specific enterprise across the island, clustered around its biggest cities in summer but tied to no single place. In this sense, like its seasonal cycle, the festival is ephemeral: a passing celebration of art, music and so forth. But held on land already steeped in thousands of years of Aboriginal culture.

No matter the sites we use for our festival in nipaluna (Hobart) and Launceston, or along the Midlands, our presence here is founded on a colonial structure, a system built on invasion of this place and dispossession of its people. It is clearly a contradiction to acknowledge that the land we hold our festival on was never ceded while continuing to use it, rent it from non-traditional owners, and invite festival-goers to meet us there.

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– Mona Foma