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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-03-20 Daily Xml
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FORMAT COLLECTIVE INC.

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (16:02): I rise today to speak on why Format always wins. For many of you, Format may be something unknown to you, but for many young people and many artists, musicians, writers and creatives in the city of Adelaide Format is well known. What is Format? According to their website, the 'Format Collective is a group of artists, writers, musicians and party technicians loosely based around the Format Zine Shop in Adelaide's CBD' on Peel Street. A zine is, in fact, a hand-produced magazine, for those of you who have not heard of such a thing.

Aside from the zine shop they have there, they hold monthly or so exhibitions, regular live music gigs, what they call 'random acts of public art', a nifty lo-fi recording studio and the annual Format Festival. At times, they have also housed other artistic enterprises. I have certainly been to craft sort of festivals, if you like, there. I also know that local theatre production companies have housed their officers there and used that space. Radio Adelaide have held their birthday party launch there and many of those who are aware of the arts scene and the creative scene in Adelaide are actually very familiar with the work of Format.

Each member of the collective is autonomous, answerable to nobody and there is nothing but, as they say again on the website, 'a vague sort of consensus'. Everyone does their own thing with the space and, once a week, they meet up and let each other know what they have done and what they intend to do. They say that if they were to assign Format an ideology it should be anarcho-situationism or techno-libertarianism or even neo-leisure revivalism, perhaps naive post-entertainment-utopianism or, in fact, party-to-survivalism. Format does not get any money; it is completely run by volunteers, and they put on some pretty darn amazing events.

Format has been on Peel Street since 2010. In that time, Format has run five major festivals, hundreds of exhibitions, many live music shows, sold thousands of zines and given the community a place to meet, rehearse, record, perform, read, or just to check emails, all of it on a shoestring budget.

Lately, Format's financial position has become more tenuous because of the renovation of the building in which it is housed. In fact, over the past eight months, the renovations on the floor above have involved cutting utilities, deafening construction noise, a quantity of rubble and dust that has severely impacted Format's capacity to function, let alone retain an income, and, in addition to that, it has recently been notified by its property developer landlord that the rent would be up for market review. It still manages to struggle on.

However, the next bit of news that Format was to receive is the reason for this construction above them in Peel Street: there is to be a new tenant moving in, an offshoot of the Melbourne-based Hub Space. On the new Hub Adelaide website, it is announced:

The SA government have announced that they will provide up to $1m in initial seed funding for Hub Adelaide. This will be spent on the fit-out of the Peel St property, recruitment and cocreation of the community and the space.

So the state government has given some Victorians $1 million to fit out the space above Format in a building it has occupied since 2010. To cap it all off, it now looks like Format is going to have to close down this month, and it is celebrating with a party called 'Format Always Wins' on the last weekend of this month. However, Format does question why (and I agree) it is being shafted, given the several thousand people who have been in touch to give their support, including, I understand, the live music Thinker in Residence and other members of the government and that we are being told by this state government that we need more creative hubs.

Format makes it clear that it has no grudge against Hub Adelaide. It does not blame Hub Adelaide, but it does question why, when it was assured that this government was sympathetic, it was negotiated with the landlord to acquire the space upstairs from Format for an interstate business which would benefit from a $1 million incentive. Format says on its website that the phrase, 'breathtaking betrayal' sounds a bit dramatic, but that it is not far from the mark, and it challenges this government—and I second that challenge—to 'prove that we lie.' Prove that Format always wins by actually starting with the creatives in this city and in this state and supporting those people first. There is no animosity between Format and Hub Adelaide; it wishes Hub Adelaide the best, but let us support Format.

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