By Ruth Skilbeck
The good news about Cementa Contemporary
Art Festival just keeps getting bigger – and better. Every time I go to start
writing something about this festival, some new extraordinary announcement has
been made.
First of all in the middle of the night, came
the announcement on facebook that Cementa_13 has been awarded a massive (for
artist run festivals) $60,000 – this is a very large sum indeed for an artist
run festival that started up this year.
Now not only will the 70 plus artists who work in all field of
contemporary arts, be able to eat, they may also be able to sleep in beds in local
hotels – unprecedented luxury for artists who are usually unpaid and masters of the arts of survival-strategies such as dumpster-diving (eating well wrapped morsels delicately extracted from delicatessen bins in Paddington) and sleeping on floors and sofas (that is, speaking from closely observed experiences).
And the good news and feel-good Summer of
Art Love feeling is spreading.
This week came an
announcement of even greater import.
The mooted plan by a mining company, Kingsgate Consolidated, to redevelop the empty Cementa
concrete works into a silver mine has been abandoned as it is too expensive.
Instead the town may flourish with new life
as an Art town with its own international Cementa Contemporary Arts Festival
cementing the good news.
 |
| Bumper sticker from the Kandos Museum |
Already it is starting to look like an inspiring case of artists moving into an abandoned and industrial precinct and regenerating it with new life, and a creative economy, which is made a lot more possible to start-up with funding.
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