UNFINISHED BUSINESS

You ARE HERE FESTIVAL FINALE

 

We want to know where the bodies are buried.

Empty out your desks, and air your dirty laundry - NO SHOW are conducting an external audit of the You Are Here Festival. The cab charges, the kickbacks, the slush funds. The triumphs and the flops. In the tradition of the Great Australian Corporate Scandal, we’ll be moving around the festival digging up the dirt on the art you got, the art you didn’t get, and the art you just hated.


And as the festival comes to a close we’ll be collecting the debris - receipts, collateral, your scripts, your memories, your broken instruments and your broken promises - and consigning them all to the fire. Or into the shredder, or under the hammer. On closing night we will come together for the great purging of all that happened to us over these glorious two weeks, so that we can lay the spirit of the You Are Here Festival to rest. A ceremony of creation through act of destruction; a eulogy to the ephemerality of art.
Come and bury the hatchet with us.
 

 

You Are Here Festival 2013 (ACT)

Season: 9pm - Saturday 23rd March

Venue: Fletcher Jones Building (and walking to the secondary venue, the Watch House)

 

Co-created by NO SHOW

(Mark Pritchard & Bridget Balodis)

With Emma Hall

Live Music by Cathy Petocz and Sam King

Audio Interviews by Emma Hall

Photography by Sarah Walker

 

Thanks to the You Are Here Festival staff, artists, and audiences for their generosity and openness.

 

Unfinished Business is a progressive audit of an indie arts festival. Clutching clipboards, clad in suits and hi-vis, Emma, Bridget and myself tour the festival attempting to record and measure the festival, seeing everything, meeting everyone, taking quantitative and qualitative data along the way. It's an impossible task, performed by a team with no auditing experience, but the result gives some measure of the immeasurable beauty and significance of these ad hoc convergences of artists from across the country.

 

On the closing night of each festival we perform a funeral for the festival, paying homage to the life of this temporary community and the art that was. By candlelight and mournful organ, we perform readings of pointless email chains, equipment lists, vox pops, and mythic texts, honour the experience of both the banal and the profound. We then destroy key objects on stage, offerings from each of the works, and pile the remains into an inflatable boat to ferry the festival into the underworld. At You Are Here, this was a solemn candle-lit procession through the streets of Canberra to the afterparty. At Crack, we lead the audience down to the waterfront for a final sunset reading, as we lowered the bark into the water and the auditors swam it out to sea.