Cementa36

Kandos is a town haunted by the ghost of extraction. Cementa is its biennial art festival–a portmanteau that references Kassel’s behemoth Documenta and the hundred-year-old cement factory that quarried local limestone in Kandos until 2011, closing with just a half-day’s notice given to workers. Over the four-day festival, visitors pour in from adjacent regions but, overwhelmingly, from Sydney and Melbourne, to visit exhibitions and public programs that take place in Kandos’s cultural centres, including Kandos Museum, St Dominic’s Catholic Church, WAYOUT Artspace, and the North East Wiradjuri Cultural Centre.

The festival invariably brings up a number of ethical questions. How does one stage a biennial in a rural, post-industrial context without being exploitative? How does an artist from the big smoke of Sydney or Melbourne avoid an extractive relationship with the regional town while temporarily in residence? In The Lure of the Local (1997), Lucy Lippard’s answer is to see place as multicentred, where artists must be wary of their own “deracinated notion of art,” and should instead adhere to a “place ethic” that is provocative, collaborative, and engaged in the specific geography, culture, and people of a place, “without disturbing or invading.” What a tightrope. It’s often noted that the concrete that made the Sydney Harbour Bridge was produced in Kandos, and at Cementa I’m interested in the reverse: what happens when you import cultural material to Australia’s regions, so far from its purported cultural centre?

One of the festival’s most potent works was the film YACKADUNA (2026) by Penrith Miers Archive, a sprawling collaborative project by Wiradjuri/Yuin/Gumbaynggirr archivist Madika Penrith and ethnomusicologist Sam Miers. The film was accompanied by a Wiradjuri country sound compilation that was installed in the Wiradjuri Cultural Centre and traced the three Wiradjuri rivers with field recordings and found songs and stories from the region. YACKADUNA traces an epic heritage, starting with Yackaduna himself, a Wiradjuri/Yorta Yorta artist also known as Tommy McRae, and his illustrations of Indigenous life at the time of colonisation. The lineage extends to activists Burnum Burnum and Gary Foley and their self-determined gestures and efforts that massively shifted Indigenous life in Australia. The film is a necessary document that ambitiously archives generations of resistance. The most spectacular gesture of the festival was a performance night that ushered in nightfall from inside Wollemi Standing Stones, a Stonehenge-esque formation on a pastoral private property. Sound for the Stars featured a set from the Archive, with Sam Miers mixing sound from their compilation, while Penrith held a microphone to nearby banjo frogs that leant their croaks to the set. The archival efforts of the duo represent a deep engagement with Wiradjuri country that indispensably enriches the orientation of Cementa to the location where it takes place.

A different provocation was offered by Kim Williams and Lucas Ilhein, who are frequent collaborators of the Kandos School for Cultural Adaptation (run by the local founder and creative director of Cementa, Alex Wisser) and who appeared at Cementa24. Their current research project, Pootopia, has a travelling “TURDIS”—a hot pink composting toilet cubicle that has been on tour for two years and counting. It sat prominently in Kandos in front of the Community Centre. A whole world was created around Pootopia, with an anthemic song (“Poo and Wee,” which we sung as a choir at Cementa HQ), zines, and many opportunities to participate: by painting your poo, engaging in the guided somatic movements and chants to encourage “conscious shitting,” or by actually making an “offering” in the toilet, for which you would receive one “shitcoin.” Pootopia asked you to join in imagining that humanure could be a world-shifting sustainable practice. Now, compare this participatory public excrement installation to Florentina Holzinger’s Seaworld Venice at the Austrian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale where naked performers have been bathing in the urine of Biennale-goers for months. Holzinger’s concurrent public toilet presents a masochistic version of this septic story. Its hydrofeminist imperative is explored with a level of extremity that is particular to an eroticised posthuman aesthetic of climate art that positions itself in crisis. I wonder why it is that at Cementa26 the ecological art instead looked optimistically zany?

St Dominic’s Church on the hill was host to Othy Willis’s Rest and Repair Space, another utopian project mitigating a different kind of waste. The idea is simple: you brought clothes, shoes, or otherwise broken things into the space, and Willis and her collaborators would help you mend them. This is an ongoing practice for Willis, who was previously lead repairer at reuse and repair centre The Bower in Summer Hill, and conducted a Repair Café from WAYOUT Artspace. For Willis, repair has a myriad of meanings. In the space there was a quietly arresting rammed earth wall from which you could carefully take tools for mending. If you hadn’t brought anything, you could have quietly absorbed yourself in the library resourced with books on Indigenous land care, relationship anarchy, and even socially engaged practice at Documenta (ad-hoc citations for Willis’s practice). A laptop played a meditative tune that made the room hum; harmonious instruments were selected and laid along with it, so that if you joined in to play the hang drum there was no way to make a discordant sound. You may have missed it, but there were also mealworms and beetles in a ceramic tower home. Willis has been living with them for some time, cultivating a place where they will eventually eat and break down plastic waste, to then be further metabolised by her mushrooms. Albeit on a personal scale, the suggestion here is that Willis can repair the world with an arsenal of bugs and fungus that could slowly eat the world’s plague of plastic waste. The success of Willis’s installation is owed to how deeply she lives her practice—in contrast it isn’t so easy to introduce a socially engaged activity to, say, a sculptural practice that asks participants at random to respond by drawing. When a rush of visitors came in it felt like a temporary tinkering commune, which I think is the experiential aim of multi-day festivals like these: to make visitors feel part of a warm and fuzzy communal outcome.

Just out of town, in the World Heritage listed Wollemi National Park, Ganguddy-Dunns Swamp, was abuzz with visitors at its campsite. Lichen Kelp and Dylan Marotell’s Kayak Orchestra hijacked the local kayak tours. When I arrived to spectate with the other campers and bathers, kinetic instruments whirred and dinged on the banks making a delightful assemblage of found objects sing against the landscape. Participants in kayaks floated toward the bank, and Kelp and Marotell’s instruments were then attached to each kayak, beginning the symphony of the Orchestra in delightfully odd harmony with the surrounds. The swamp’s beauty cannot be understated—its freshwater, nested fowl in the reeds, and ancient Dabee rock paintings represent a long history. The geological ancientness of Wollemi National Park is exactly why coal, silver, and lime deposits—and our mines—line its western edge. In town, I chatted with a member of the Rylstone District Environment Society, who had a stall at Cementa’s local market. The Society is protesting a proposed lead mine in the area. I asked him about Cenagen, the private company that has set up a slick office next to the community radio station. I learned about the company through a discussion on Marilena Hewitt’s experimental book of collected treatises, 00-02 ENERGY (2026). Here, contributor Othy Willis posed Cenagen as a problem in the local energy economy. Cenagen are proposing to bring Sydney’s waste to Kandos by train and repurpose the cement factory to gassify the rubbish in a process that heats it to 1000 degrees to create fuel. The Society member tutted and told me about Cenagen’s attempts to garner support by sending ice cream trucks to the school, and skewing numbers of support at their town halls. If Cenagen’s proposed material relationship between Sydney and Kandos is to import the city’s garbage, I ask myself if Cementa’s self-proclaimed orientation to “land art” requires urban-dwelling artists deal with those politics?

Has Cementa naturalised into life in Kandos? Curator Sebastian Henry-Jones suggested to me that, thirteen years after its inception, nearly a whole generation of children has grown up with the festival. I grabbed a hotdog at the RSL and went to return to the bowling green to watch attendees piling ice bricks to make Joy Zhou’s The Melting Well. “What? Are you going to watch the ice melt?” said the onlooking man, who instructed me to add English mustard. Did he have a point? I read afterwards that the action was imitating limestone quarrying, but it wasn’t evident to me or the man hovering at the hot dog stand. Some locals were less expressive. When I asked the elderly couple next to me what they thought of Lucas “Granpa” Abela’s performance, they declined to respond. While Abela made noise on the glass with his mouth (he formerly used to shatter it with his body’s force and continue performing, bleeding) that has been famously sampled by American Experimental Hip Hop band Death Grips, they withstood the noise by shaking their heads at each other and holding their ears closed.

Claire Bishop expresses a scepticism about participatory art in her 2012 book Artificial Hells. At the Kandos Museum alone, I was asked to make cement, draw an object from its annals, and write a story on a typewriter. There was no shortage of opportunities to engage—in paper flower making, weaving, dyeing, simulating historical cement races, painting a word (“Trump,” “patriarchy” and “crocs” were offered first) to be burned in a pyromaniac performance. Bishop’s ambivalence about participation’s proponents is because there is hardly a framework to support or critique the loose aims of participatory art and the way it often falls short of changing the world. Bishop writes, “(t)he upshot is that art is perceived both as too removed from the real world and yet as the only space from which it is possible to experiment: art must paradoxically remain autonomous in order to initiate or achieve a model for social change.” Meta-discourse on these models took place in a community forum on the second day of the festival. “The Phenomenon” featured Dabee elder Peter Swain, Cementa28’s curators Lana Nguyen and Lucas Ilhein, and this year’s curator Henry-Jones. A speculative model was introduced for Cementa’s future where its curators would have exponentially more years to develop work (instead of the standard two). The bubble of the hypothetical framework-making frenzy was burst by a recent resident of Kandos who questioned the speculative logic of the forum, complaining of the lack of events between festivals, despite the evident cultural infrastructure that could support it. In that sense, the forum worked perfectly in facilitating discussion in the local community and indicating the residents’ thirst to engage.

Optimistically, we continue to ask, what can art do for us. I don’t share Bishop’s antagonism to the participatory form en masse. Henry-Jones’ penchant for “DIY-thinking,” as he describes it, lends itself to the nature of a festival, where tourists and locals gather to take part in the ongoing, albeit temporary, environment of the biennial. Though Bishop’s framework does help us to position participatory and community-focused art projects, which “no longer occupy a subversive, anti-authoritarian force, but have become a cornerstone of post-industrial economic policy.” Certainly, the support for Cementa, in its thirteenth year, by Destination NSW, the Local Government Area, and Creative Australia demonstrates that institutions believe that publicly funding arts projects can economically and culturally revitalise a place. However, the festival seems firmly planted left of centre, hardly at risk of losing its kooky subversive flair. Perhaps this kookiness is the aesthetic of government-endorsed regional revitalisation? For all the possible criticisms of the biennial model, Cementa26 struck a unique balance between First Nations leadership and Henry-Jones’s affection for DIY. All around, a slate of artists invited their audience in with a contagious fondness for Kandos and its surrounds. I would take Cementa over Cenagen any day.