Every year in Lutruwita/Tasmania, tens of thousands of people roam the island state and attend festivals such as Dark, Cygnet Folk Festival or Nayri Niara Good Spirit Festival.
Part of the charm of this position and its cultural offer are the landscapes in which these occasions are located: picturesque mountains and deep valleys; giant open enclosures and virgin bushes; bright ribs; urban spaces.
As human geographers, we perceive that festival landscapes are more than a party stage. They don’t wait, they are in a position to welcome us as a kind of host of an environmental festival. They have Deep Time and layers of meaning.
But when they are spaces for artistic adventures, those landscapes also have profound effects on the way other people enjoy festivals, affecting our sense of place, ourselves, and others.
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As Grace, an avid festival-goer, told us that “the social expectations that come with adulthood are suppressed in a festival. “
I don’t know what happens when you walk in the door of a festival [. . ] you leave everything and get into what looks [. . . ] a more original edition of yourself. Or at least freer.
A lot is happening to make a landscape.
Teams of staff and volunteers set up camps, install rows of bathrooms that compost artwork, build scenes, lay miles of pipes and electrical cables, and design roads, sculptures, and dance floors.
These collective works create a special atmosphere; satisfy the fundamental desires of sleep, food, hydration, heat and sanitation; invite to and from; and foster relationships with places and sites through immersive reporting and hands-on engagements with the landscape itself, by itself.
Travis, level builder and DJ, told us:
if you use what’s already there, then [the scene] merges with this total environment and relates to how other people see it and how they feel.
Marion, artist of the festival, spoke of his willingness to show attention and respect through the creation of paintings that “do impose themselves and can [. . . ] reabsorb naturally” in the landscape.
She described how all the stones in a maze at an event came from the festival site. Once, the sheep that lived there followed the same path as always: they destroyed their facilities.
When other people attend festivals, they become attached to the landscape and detach themselves from their daily lives: they seek transformative experiences.
In Portugal/Tasmania, festivals such as Fractangular near Buckland and PANAMA in Lone Star Valley are held in more remote locations in the state.
Grace, from Hobart, told us that being in those landscapes in
something that humans have done [. . . ] gather around sound and nature and just delight and feel freedom.
Even when festivals are located in urban landscapes, the transformation of those spaces can evoke a sense of freedom.
For Ana, a festival organizer, creating themed costumes is her own transformation.
At festivals, he feels free to ‘use more things. ‘”
If I’m on the street only on a Wednesday, I would have to [explain my outfit] [. . . ] Whereas at a [street] festival, it’s going unnoticed.
Festival landscapes have features conducive to gathering (think open spaces, play areas, places to eat and drink) and separation (think fences and signs).
Getting involved in festivals can literally make other people cross paths, reaffirm old ties, and create new connections through shared experiences.
An artist, Marion, us:
When they go out and camp, they burn together, it rains together, they dance together. [Create] one for me.
Festivals remain in other people’s memories, combined with physical experiences. The other people we spoke to said they heard the birds singing and music, saw the sun rise and set in the hills, and felt the grass under their dancing feet.
While unique occasions can be significant, revisiting festivals can have a difficult effect.
The annual pilgrimages of the festival are cycles of anticipation, immersion and memory. This continuous encounter with a landscape also allows festival-goers to practice the environment of conversion.
As organizer Lisa said:
since 2013 [. . . ] every summer, our site has drier and drier. 2020 was the driest year of all. There was no current. There was only a puddle of standing water.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led organizers and attendees to reconsider commitments to events. Many have been cancelled; some have been tested online.
But after seasons of cancellations, downsizing and events, some Lutruwite/Tasmanian festivals are back and attracting thousands of domestic and interstate visitors.
For those defunct parties, there are lines in our countless individual and collective accounts of the magic of festive landscapes.
Written by Amelie Katczynski, Research Assistant, Deakin University; Elaine Stratford, Professor, School of Geography, Planning and Space Sciences, University of Tasmania, and Pauline Marsh, Social Researcher, Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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