-TOPIA at Abbotsford Convent, Photograph by Max Deutscher
Day for it.
It was windy. There were a couple of tent-shaped sculptures in the Convent backyard made of foliage and flowers and draped in foil. Lots of foil, which wowed and fluttered with the variations in wind speed.
“It really activates the space,” said my friend, impersonating an urban planner. But the billowing foil did add to the uncanny atmosphere at -TOPIA, which was back at Abbotsford Convent for its second year.
No News were on stage playing rockified house music with a dab of epic cheese, a la Vangelis. The two band members – a drummer and a synth player, who occasionally multi-tasked on saxophone – were wearing chain mail coifs.
No News, Photo by Max Deutscher
Out in the grass, four people were squirming around on their hands and knees, chasing their insides. “I like these creepy people,” I heard someone say. It was Lucy Eidelson’s Cult, whose teaser script read, “The fig wasp’s wings break off as she wriggles her way through the narrow opening of the fig.” True. But in a possessed and kind of erotic way.
Just prior, in the Convent’s Magdalen Laundry, the Golden Scissor Puppets – mythical, marine-like creatures dressed in what looked like old curtains from the Salvos fill-a-bag section – were also “activating” the space, hyping up the small crowd in to see Simona Castricum.
Simona played “The Present,” a song from 2020 with lyrics that look at politicised gender identities and the burdens placed on those whose bodies have become political footballs to act as spokespeople. It struck an ambivalent chord: it’s an excellent, vintage technopop song, but lyrics like “Sick of talking about my trauma / At the conference or the panel” and “In the present we stop gatekeepers / Gifting free speech to the haters” felt rawer and more unresolved than they did five years ago.
“The meaning of that one just keeps changing,” Simona said. “What a shitshow.”
Photo by Max Deutscher
The strange diversions began as soon as you entered -TOPIA. You had the option of getting a drink and some food, sitting down for a game of chess, or entering a rustic sensory deprivation maze that spilled out into a dark and smoky dancefloor.
Hidden to the right of the entrance was the Sirens stage, located inside a small chapel. Chairs were covered in austere white linens and the stage was overrun by a mound of candle wax that looked like it’d been forming since last century. For some reason there was a bathroom scale on the floor, which, as a recovering anorexic, was the most distressing thing I saw all day.
It might sound like -TOPIA was contriving quirkiness simply to prove it’s not like other festivals. But the art installations and performance pieces weren’t an overcooked distraction. Everything had a playful, homemade aesthetic, and suffused the festival site with an irregular pulse.
Chuleo Club with House of Furia, Photo by Max Deutscher
The acts were largely left to be themselves, and there were occasions when the artist on stage and the surreal scenery were in harmony and others where there was a slight dissonance. Acid house DJ and curator Richard Sen’s warm analogue dance music felt slightly in conflict with the dark industrial haze of the Sensoria stage at 5pm. But Chuleo Club’s mix of Latin club, house and baile funk was perfectly accompanied by the ballroom dancers from House of Furia.
The most apt pairing was Spike Fuck in the Oratory. Spike’s lo-fi glam and fractured country songs put the crowd in a trance. Most people sat on the floor. Some were sprawled out on cushions. One person looked like they’d fallen asleep.
Couples and pairs of friends held each other close as Spike and his three band members played songs about life’s fragility, about obsession, addiction and religion. The hymnal flavour of “Other Right Hand of the Lord” was accentuated by the fact that we were in an actual church.
Spike Fuck at TOPIA, Photo by Max Deutscher
Stealing away from the dancefloor to watch Spike spill his guts out was not as jarring as you might imagine. The two experiences combined to activate a release of oxytocin, reminding us that through coming together and embracing difference, everyone gets lifted up.
This was the feeling that lingered after leaving -TOPIA. I look forward to more earthly and unearthly delights next year.
-TOPIA was held at Abbotsford Convent, on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, on Friday 26 September.
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