Community Outreach & Special Projects
What can Cairns do to go beyond the normal Festival model? How can we, as a creative community, engineer new cultural identity projects and innovative collaborations? How can we proceed from the Cairns Regional Council Cultural Plan, and do bold, new things to connect people with their culture, their creative essence, their artistic potential?
Beyond the usual audience-based events, Cairns Festival continues to identify and develop engaging and innovative creative ideas — projects that engage people with the cultures around them. This year, the Festival will introduce the below community outreach initiatives and maybe even develop a few more. We think they will expand the idea of what a festival is and can do. All we need are your ideas, input, and collaboration. Cairns Festival wants to encourage dialogue and conversation year round, and find extraordinary ways to reveal the wonders of the creative process and the remarkable creative people of Cairns Region. We will go beyond the usual Festival format starting now, and reveal Tropical North Queensland as a hotbed of creativity, cultural exploration, and community engagement. Because it is. The following ideas are just the beginning of that process...
Opening Notes Project What if we asked the community’s musicians, artists, and creative people to come up with something special for every child born in our region? What if we packaged these cultural elements into a small but profound music CD and booklet—and then gifted this neatly-wrapped parcel to each of the 4,000 babies born in the Far North next year? What if, through a partnership with local hospitals and birthing centres, we found a way to present this gift on the day of birth, at the place of birth?
We have, and we will, and it’s called Opening Notes. And no other arts festival in the world is doing something like it. Cairns Festival, in partnership with sole sponsor Cairns Penny Savings and Loans, will launch the Opening Notes Project with the first baby born during our 2010 opening weekend, and continue to with the 4,000 children expected thereafter. It will be a pure and simple gift—filled with expressions of our culture and imbued with a profound sense of place. Opening Notes will be a reminder that children in Cairns are born into a diverse and thriving creative community, and they inherit and continue the culture we give them. It is an idea driven by Cairns Regional Council and its robust long-term Cultural Plan. Opening Notes will be the first gift, our unique and heart-felt welcome, from a whole new Cairns Festival and its innovative approach to community cultural engagement.
Posters to the People There may not be any free lunch, but thanks to the Festival’s latest initiative, our community has the promise of free art. As a lead in to the 2010 Cairns Festival, we've invited four local artists to supply an image that represents their own visual language and individual graphic identity. Caroline Mudge, Sam Tupou, Arone Meeks, and Dominic Johns answered the call. The Festival has produced a limited edition of 500 posters of each artist’s work, and these are now being given away to anyone interested in owning, displaying, and connecting with them.
Posters to the People is the Festival’s way of celebrating the talent—and four unique visual communicators— resident in our own backyard. Now that the Festival Headquarters is open in City Place, the posters are available in the lobby, on a first come, first served basis. The community is now invited in to have a look and take home whichever images they want — an instant Cairns art collection free of charge. And yet another gift from an innovative new kind of Festival. Posters to the People was made possible with some generous help and support from Joel Goodman at Auxiliary Central.
Festival HQ In early July, Cairns Festival opened a new Headquarters in the ground floor of the former School of the Arts building in City place. Home to our staff and seasonal associates, this central office is also a year-round resource for creative people, visiting artists, new ideas, and emerging collaborations. We want the Festival HQ to become a gathering point, a resource, and a nexus for creative people and notions in Cairns. Bring your ideas and projects to Festival Headquarters, and help us develop interesting and meaningful projects and programs.
Southernmost Art-o-mat Ten year’s ago, North Carolina artist Clark Whittington found a rusty old cigarette vending machine in a shed. He gradually restored it, redesigned the facade, and asked his artist friends if they would want to make small original art objects to sell out of the machine. Everyone said yes, and the Art-o-mat was born. Now Whittington manages a network of almost 100 repurposed art vending machines from Vienna to Los Angeles—and he has over 300 contributing artists stocking the machines from all over the world. Thanks to Cairns Festival, North Queensland is about to become home to the first Art-o-mat in the Southern Hemisphere. Read more...
Flags of Imaginary Nations Let’s pretend the far North became its own nation. Who would design the flag, and what iconic symbols and features might it incorporate? Would the new national banner reveal our sense of place, or serve as an abstract reference to life between rainforest and reef? Cairns Festival is asking local artists and image-makers to ponder these same questions and each come up with their own version of a new flag. Will there be a banner of the Coral Sea People’s Republic, the Tropical North Independent State, a New Unified Bumma, the Wait-a-While Nation? Find out at this Cairns Festival exhibition, and look for the real, yet imaginary flags to be flying over the Esplanade’s Eastern Lawn this season. Click here to learn more.
Esplanart: New Ephemeral Art Commissions For the 2010 season, Cairns Festival
and Cairns Regional Gallery have commissioned ten local artists to
create site-specific works for locations along the Esplanade. The new installations begin appearing from 18
August and remain on view throughout Cairns Festival. Look for curious
and engaging visual art statements and ephemeral art ideas across the local landscapes, and Click here to learn about the 2010 artists and commissions...
Empress Stiltdance Festival Residency Based in Amsterdam and Wellington, New Zealand, Empress Stiltdance come to Cairns for the month of August as the first-ever Festival Artists in Residence. The carnival and stilt-walk troupe will spend several weeks creating a new aerial work, Kahaku: A Butterfly Romance. The public will have a chance to watch the open rehearsals, witness the work in progress, and attend a free preview of the finished piece in late August. Empress Stiltdance is the first of many artist residencies that Cairns Festival will be hosting throughout the year to help creative people from all over the world connect with our community and create something new while here. And it's just another way that Cairns Festival can go beyond the normal approach to the creative process and Festival presenting. Click here to learn more about the Empress Stiltdance residency project...
Festival Badge Partners This year’s logo is based on a badge/button design, and the Festival has produced 1,000 of these as promotional give-aways to support our season. Get your free badge now! To activate these badges as useful objects, we have formed new micro-partnerships with dozens of local businesses and shops. All of these Cairns Festival Badge Partners will be offering a special discount, free item, or deal for people engaging their business while wearing the Festival badge. It's a simple project to encourage residents and visitors to support our city's shops and local merchants, and better connect our economic base with the Festival activities and creative experiences ahead. Read more...
Elect to be at Cairns Festival Rolled out just in time for the Federal election, as the streets and intersections fill with mundane and uncolourful campaign signs, Cairns Festival decided to add its statement, a bit of colour (actually a lot of colour), and another option for people pondering their election choices. Thanks to designer Ray Clark, and a tongue-in-cheek blessing of our truly creative Mayor Val, this new series of non-political political posters has begun to populate the public spaces in our city. They offer a creative foil to the population of vote-hungry personages peering out at motorists and residents. Cairns Festival asks not for your vote. We respectfully request that you elect to join us from 20 August to 5 September for a colourful, creative, exciting season in the Tropical Far North. Make your choice and cast your vote, then join us for the Festival's opening parade, fireworks, and free concert by local band Kamerunga. Click below to see all of the Elect to be at Cairns Festival
