Acland Street Projection Festival

Acland Street has long been a Melbourne fixture synonymous with culture, art, music, cakes, palm trees and the beachside. If there is something happening in St Kilda, you can bet that Acland Street will be at the heart of it. You’d be hard-pressed to find a ‘South-Sider’ who wasn’t taken as a child to marvel at the stacks of magnificent cakes in the windows of the Acland Street bakeries, or who knows the face of Luna Park as well as their own family’s.

As part of this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival, a new creative duo has teamed up to bring Acland Street into the spotlight once again with the inaugural Acland Street Projection Festival (ASPF). “The Two Fionas” – Fiona Brook and Fiona Sweet – are industry friends who share uncannily similar hair, a love of champagne and a fierce sense of independence. Having both worked in media for many years (Sweet as a Graphic Designer and Brook as CEO of her own PR firm, Zilla and Brook), the “dynamo” women decided to combine their talents and love of Melbourne’s art scene to produce their own event – and hence ASPF was born.

The inaugural festival features 17 artists, mostly local, and as Fiona Sweet surmises, it is a “festival aimed at recreating a bit of old St Kilda, taking art from inside the galleries and back onto the streets and walls of historic, iconic and often irreverent Acland Street. Art that is illuminated.” Nick Azidis, Managing Director of ProjectionTeknik and creator of over 1500 projection installations throughout Australia, has cast his impressive and modern geometric print onto the entire façade of the historic St Kilda RSL.

As a keen rower, I instantly recognised Sally Mannall’s work projected onto the Commonwealth Bank as a repeating loop of footage of a ‘rowing tank’. Sally’s work, entitled ‘The Rowing Project’, explores ideas of time expressed in the form of duration, repetition and fatigue, represented here by the monotonous and repetitive strokes and actions of four rowers in a land-locked training pool. Lex Middelton’s piece entitled ‘Evidence’ was also a highlight, projecting pictures of old tickets, signage and labels from his personal collection marking a lengthy “pursuit of desire, travel, chores, love and grind through the streets of St Kilda”.

Martin Foley, St Kilda’s local MP, sums up the festival by explaining that the projections are “the works of minds that get together and collaborate, that work in such a way that it becomes more than just the sum of it’s parts. [The festival] becomes the kind of thing that every year, we want to come back to”. Historic Acland Street, located on the traditional land of the Yalukit Wilum Clan, is the perfect backdrop for the art that has been brought to life by the local artists. ASPF is “everything that you would want from a grassroots, community-run festival. [It incorporates] the best of the values that St Kilda rightly reflects: creativity, community engagement, and democratizing the messages about what culture and creativity can be.”

#ASPF2015 is running until 20 September 2015, with lights switched on at dusk and remaining illuminated until late. As the two Fionas say: “We have come out of winter, [so it’s time to] light up not just this part of St Kilda, but this part of Melbourne.” Light up your spring by getting down to Acland Street to appreciate all Melbourne has to offer for the start of the longer nights and warmer weather.

Acland Street Projection Festival
Friday September 11 – Sunday September 20
Acland Street, St Kilda
aspf.org.au