Manifesto

The Question

It is essential that the Dingo festival maintain a rigorous line of inquiry into the work that it is doing beyond the serving up of music as a commodity for purchase by affluent consumers for their diversion and entertainment. This inquiry begins with key questions. What is a festival? What is it for? What is culture? Why come together in this way to celebrate? How does the ancient idea of the festival still live in these kind of events? How might a contemporary festival strike up a relevance to the culture from and as which it emerges? What is lost when a culture loses its festivals and their relation to the seasons, to the earth, to the ancestors, to the weaving of the cultural fabric which carries in its tapestry the meanings and values by which that culture lives and sustains itself?

Dingo as a piece of living performative cultural research. It unfolds around the concept of the return of culture to its place as an essential component of the health of a society. As important as schools and hospitals to the flourishing and perpetuation of a society. How do we rethink this role of culture in a practical sense. To stop demanding that cultural and creative activity justify itself through its profitability, marketability, and its circulation in a marketplace.

We contend that the Northern Rivers is a highly appropriate and apt venue for this investigation. From its ancient status as the land of the first sun, as the place where the rivers meet, where the Bundjalung peoples fished and hunted and farmed and dreamed and created, where the European invaders found such fertile ground for their pastoral cultures, where the hippies came over the hill in the 1960s with a new festival, and where subsequent waves of immigrants from the big cities continue to overlay their culture. This region is a particularly rich source of grassroots cultural and creative activities. This place is a living answer to the question of how geology, climate, people, and terrain combine to give rise to layers of cultural complexity and creative wealth.

How to think and thank this country for the gift of its provenance. Dingo is an invitation to think, to speak, to imagine, to dwell with this country, to learn from and with each other. To listen to and breathe the land’s ghostbreath. To read the stories in the stars, to taste the fruits of its earth, listen to the music of its skies, rest in the bed of its earth. How to stand on this country? This is the cultural work of this festival.

Dr Stuart Grant
Director of Art