The Unconformity festival returns to Queenstown next month with a four-day line-up of experimental art, music, performances and place-based experiences – culminating in the Unconformity Cup football game.
“[The Unconformity Cup] is one of our long-standing, very cherished traditions,” the festival’s artistic director Loren Kronemyer told Tasmanian Times.
“Queenstown is home to a very iconic oval, which is a gravel oval. It rains heavily in Queenstown, and so there’s a gravel oval to make up for it. It’s part of the local identity and it promotes a sense of toughness and of incredible unity around the Queenstown Crows, which is the local football team.”
The Unconformity Cup game will see the home team, ‘The West’, take on ‘The Rest’, a visiting team made up of players from across the state.
“It’s an inclusive team on both sides,” Kronemyer said.
“This can include folks of all ages and all genders.”
She explained that Queenstown and the west coast play an important role in shaping the whole Unconformity festival, which started life as the Queenstown Arts and Heritage Festival, created by a coalition of local residents.
“It’s completely fundamental.
“The Unconformity is of, by and made with Queenstown. All of the work is responding to the west coast. We work widely on the west coast. The purpose is to shine a light on describing creative ecology that has emerged here.”
Kronemyer said the Unconformity festival also gives people who may never have visited Queenstown a chance to experience the town and the west coast for themselves.
“I think that the region itself is incredibly multi-faceted.
“The best thing that we can do as an organisation is continue to give people a platform to articulate what that region means to them and offer our audience opportunities to come and have a look.”
There are “lots and lots of opportunities” for all the artists and performers as well.
“Because we’re a very multi-arts focused festival, we work across a lot of different genres of making,” Kronemyer said, noting the 80 plus artists exhibiting in studios, shopfronts and secret spaces for The Unconformity Art Trail this year.
One of the events of the Unconformity festival that Kronemyer is particularly excited about is the ‘Semaphore Score’ – an artwork by A Published Event – which opens with a message in palawa kani by Pakana artist Theresa Sainty.
“[It will be] a working semaphore communication channel,” Kronemyer explained.
“To participate, you can pick up a semaphore code booklet, write a message and then hand deliver it to a signaller, who will send it out into the valley using flags and other signallers who will be positioned all the way up and over Mount Ellen. It’s incredibly ambitious in scale and in scope.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing what people choose to communicate.”
‘One of a kind’
Kronemyer told Tasmanian Times that she believes the Unconformity festival is “completely one of a kind.”
“By that, I mean that the people are all incredibly individual,” she explained.
“The locations where we’re working are incredibly unique. There is both the deep time of the very strange and significant geological history of the region.
“There’s the living history of the rainforest, and there’s the lived experience of extraction, mining and industry in the region, and now there’s a thriving creative ecology that continues to develop.”
She added that this layering of culture creates fertile ground for artists to respond to – which is something she hasn’t seen elsewhere in a festival setting.
“What brings [The Unconformity] together and makes it special is the number of different voices, each with their own perspective responding to those same views – which is the west coast.”
The team behind The Unconformity will collect data on the festival’s impact on both the local community and the visiting audiences, while also collaborating with researchers to measure its economic impact.
“We really care about both the data and the lived experience of what it’s like to be a part of something like this,” Kronemyer said.
For more information about The Unconformity festival, click here.
Callum J. Jones is passionate about telling stories. He studied English, History, and Journalism at the University of Tasmania and lived in Western Sydney from 2022 to 2024 while working as a journalist for Professional Planner, a leading online publication for financial planners. Callum has written for Tasmanian Times since 2018 and has also been published in a range of other outlets, including Quadrant and the BAD Western Sydney anthologies.
