What is most interesting about Newcastle’s annual This Is Not Art (TiNA) festival, is that what started 12 years ago as a community festival of independent, emerging art and culture, is still a community festival of independent, emerging art and culture.
In an era when it’s not uncommon for even the most intimate art show to be sponsored by a massive alcohol company, the non-commercial nature of TiNA is remarkable.
Australia is being hit by a relentless, daily gauntlet of live music and art festivals, but TiNA retains a truly artist-run schedule of events.
From September 30 to October 4, Newcastle was overrun by a scattergun collection of art shows, panels, gigs, discussions, workshops and conferences. The program was packed — perhaps too packed — and included the National Young Writers’ Festival, experimental music festival Sound Summit and new media and electronic culture festival called Electrofringe.
A highlight of this year’s program was “A fascination with process” at Newcastle University’s student gallery Watt Space.
Artists Hannah Brien, Michelle Gearin, David Hampton, Amy Hill and Rebecca Holmes invited the audience to watch them in their own private studio spaces, as they engaged in the creative process.
TiNA’s headquarters, the Octopod, a not-for-profit independent arts and media organisation, became an artspace and a hub where TiNA-goers could freely peruse the excellent zine library and workshop space.
The Sunday Zine and Craft Fair imaginatively highlighted the issue of the use of public space: it sprawled over a level of an eerie and otherwise completely vacant above-ground carpark.
TiNA also drew attention to the impact that urban space project Renew Newcastle has had on the city. Renew Newcastle was established to find short- and medium-term uses for vacant buildings in Newcastle’s CBD that are disused or awaiting redevelopment.
It accepts proposals from artists, community groups, cultural projects and small business owners, who are then moved into available shopfronts with the permission of the owners and real estate agents.
If the property is to be leased and redeveloped, the group using the space is given 30 days to vacate the property. In other words, it’s not squatting.
This model has gained credibility in rejuvenating otherwise dead city spaces and empowering ordinary people to claim disused urban space.
The Renew Newcastle headquarters itself is lodged in an abandoned church in the city centre.
Renew Newcastle spaces hosted dozens of TiNA events, including ARThive’s “Sticky Fingers” show, which profiled street art that is often absent from commercial galleries. The success of Renew Newcastle and the visible role it played at TiNA shows that communities can and should lead the way in setting the agenda for the development of cities and public spaces — not commercial or private interests.
The program was all the more impressive for its dependence on an army of volunteers and apparent lack of serious institutional or corporate funding. It was actually independent, rather than just “indie”. The events were mostly free.
As a format, TiNA challenges the conventions of other, more passive, art events, and was centred around community involvement. As a space for fringe culture, it showed that there’s a craving for events outside the mainstream, and that there are people who want to engage others people in collective creative projects, regardless of their bank account balance.
TiNA is not overtly political, but it’s a testament to the strength of alternative cultures that prioritise the values of community and public space.