CEMENTA24

I’m a latecomer to Cementa, the four-day biennial arts festival which takes place in Kandos, near Mudgee, in the north-east corner of the massive Wiradjuri Nation. Founded by Ann Finegan, Alex Wisser, and Georgie Pollard in 2013, Cementa has survived the stresses of COVID and bushfires to become a mainstay of New South Wales regional arts festivals. Each iteration hasn’t much more of a theme than interaction between artists and the town, many facilitated by residencies. It’s free, events pretty much within walking distance, and hectic as any urban festival if you want to see everything.

But it’s as much a question of participating and listening. Guest curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham with First Nations curator Jo Albany, this sixth Cementa inevitably had a queer twist. A surprising highlight was Melbourne-based, rural-born performance artist Georgia Banks’ Debutante Ball, 2024. Based on the ritual of girls presented to community patriarchs like so much meat, these events are as terrifying for country queer kids as school formals are for urbanites. Banks inverted it, placing three local LGBTIQ teenagers on stage, lording it in magnificently weird and wonderful outfits while the audience paraded up the aisle towards them in same sex couplings, actual or theatrical. Banks, in a pink seventies pantsuit, also led the hall in a dance lesson, and curated a soundtrack of entirely queer artists, from Tchaikovsky through Dusty Springfield to George Michael. It was hilarious fun, and on reflection moving, in terms of the bullying these kids have endured, the historical occlusion of queers from courting rituals, and how inclusive the event was sexually, generationally, racially—and sartorially. Banks hasn’t presented much work in NSW, but this will surely change.

In a vacant paddock on the edge of town, Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation’s Disturbed, 2024, series of installation performances rewarded several visits. Imogen Semmler ran a Disturb-o-teque where your abilities to survive an ecological disaster were allegorised into a disco. Adjacent, Diego Bonetto set up blankets on which punters were encouraged to lie, and cut grass from a hole in the centre, the blankets moving each day to leave a grazing imprint. Leanne Thompson filled a beautiful old cabinet with dried plants and tinctures, placing a desk adjacent at which to write letters to nature. On the Sunday, we attended Laura Fisher’s Silk Water Workshop, a discussion of the effect of environmental damage on the flow of water. Fisher’s striking, delicate hand-dyed blue pennants which marked a channel in the hillside, were animated by us as we listened, moving them around the site.

For Playback Kandos Museum, 2024, object-maker Josie Cavallaro selected a miner’s hat from the museum’s massive array of industrial and colonial relics. She then gave a score of artists an audio description of it, from which they were invited to recreate it. The results exhibited in long glass cabinets formed a subtle rhythmic expression of the individual in the communal, the disruption of conformity by handcraft and personal interpretation, as well as an ode to obsolete labour. Also from the museum, photomedia artist Cherine Fahd plumbed the archive of the town’s school photos and yearbooks. Blown up into small posters and displayed around the town, the series had a compelling, elegiac effect, the faces haunting as ghosts. Who are they all? Where are they now?

The wildest of the evening events was Emma Maye Gibson AKA Betty Grumble’s Variety Night, in which Tommy Misa’s gender-bending comic abilities shone bright, segueing into a blazing set by Celia Curtis and Ross Johnston’s White Knuckle Fever (WKF). The RSL Club was packed but the eternal queue to the bar pissed some people off, especially as half the length of it was closed. As great as the venue is, the organisation and staffing could be improved.

There are always—apparently—grumbles from locals about Cementa. The ladies in the Community Charity Shop didn’t seem that enthusiastic about selling Vanessa Berry’s intimate, idiosyncratic map (a bloody bargain at $5!): could it have been displayed and sold more prominently in more places? The best quote came from a woman at the pub on Friday night who said “Nah, I’m not going. I got me dogs to look after!” But I doubt she could have resisted WKF with Johnston’s chugging dirge guitar, Curtis’ high kicks, and full throttle Let’s get fucked up! What other band in the world can be so extreme, yet wholesomely attractive? Three under-tens danced like crazy on the stage till the end. And three local adults told me how much they loved the festival, one travelling from a nearby town to attend each year.

Somebody asked me—with a sardonic undertone in reference to all the Sydneysiders (mea culpa)—whether there were any local artists in this year’s Cementa. Yes, loads. From born-and-bred Miriam Williamson who, with Brad Allen-Waters, gave a moving tribute to her father, catastrophically injured in a hit-and-run decades earlier, to long-time resident Shani Nottingham, who set up a shop of her craftworks. Linda Jackson, who’s lived nearby on and off for years, hung beautiful linen fabrics dyed with indigo and local blackwattle bark. Dharug artist Venessa Possum from Gulamada (Blue Mountains) also used natural dyes in her cloth works, displayed in an old train carriage.

The WAYOUT art space hummed with energy from its exhibition’s opening night (I especially liked Celia Morgan’s tiny oil landscapes on coasters), through to the last day. The North East Wiradjuri Cultural Centre felt fittingly like Cementa’s foundation, with dance performances led by Jo Clancy, accompanied by Emma Syme on clapsticks and singing. Uncle Peter Swain spoke movingly at this, and the closing ceremony, as well as Always Was Always Will Be, 2024, a ritualistic performance by Djon Mundine (Bundjalung).

Mundine’s performance commemorated the 200 year anniversary of the declaration of martial law here, following a massacre of the local Dabee clan in 1823. With his body painted in red ochre, he marked the walls with Indigenous presence. These richly textured ceremonies (another featured Blak Douglas with Peter on didgeridoo) lingered, Mundine eloquent on the value of art in small villages over that in New York City or Berlin.

I thought about this all the way home as news reverberated of Israel’s rampage extending from Palestine to Lebanon, and our government’s abstention vote in the United Nations. How flaccid art can seem in the face of genocide. Yet the nurturing, porous, interactive qualities of Cementa, the attention to place and community, are exactly what we need. Kandos’ post-industrial evolution into a cultural hub is over a decade old now. It’s one of several ventures that has turned the exodus of artists from cities due to rising costs into a good thing.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 69