Kirsha Kaechele, artist and agent provocateur from Mona wowed the audience at the Tomorrowland welcome Soirée on Wednesday night with a taste of what can be achieved by stepping outside our comfort zones.
- Huge thanks to our lead sponsor Mulpha
- And to supporting sponsors: Zing Fresh, WeWork, Heaps Normal, Circle Harvest, Seadrift, Fish Butchery, Tumblong Wines
Ross Harding of Finding Infinity opened the event with a taste of his project A New Normal which aims to generate a radical sustainable future.
It’s based on circularity, with waste to energy and recycled water front and centre in the plan that’s already underway in Melbourne.
Kaechele who’s not afraid to court controversy with flair, glamour and satire, showed clips from her video spoofs that she crafted during the “boring” lockdown period of the pandemic – and proved again, why boredom is such a powerful energising force for creative people.
Starting professional life as an architect and drawing on a diverse and unusual range of early life experiences Kaechele is motivated by social equity and art and how the latter can transform the lives of under-resourced people.
In New Orleans for instance after the devastation of Cyclone Katrina she bought house after derelict house and invited artists from around the world to convert these into art.
In one house the artists covered it entirely in gold leaf. She drew on her interest in food as a galvanising force for communities and a “mash-up” of cultures. So a series of long table street feasts invited wealthy arts patrons to dine alongside local communities.
Observing how the young kids of the neighbourhood would hang around looking a tad bereft. Kaechele came up with food gardens eked out of patches of soil around the houses – that needed by the way to be first decontaminated for toxins. This led to some of the kids tasting vegetables for the first time and some even selling the produce in a step towards entrepreneurial spirit.
This became the 24 Carrot garden program, which she has now transposed to Tasmania with 24 schools now enrolled in the program to much acclaim, she reported from the education department of the state.
But it’s her Eat the Problem series of banquets she ran at Mona that have probably earned her the most notoriety, if anything can rival that of her husband David Walsh with the wild theme of many exhibitions at Mona.
The theme of the banquet and the eponymous book is to turn a problem into a resources. So take the wild deer often left to rot where it’s been culled in Tasmania and use it for food. Same with other species such as cane toad, camel, stinging nettle, Japanese knotweed, sea urchin, and yes feral cat.
In homage to this at the soirée thanks to the generosity of our sponsors Circle Harvest and Zing Fresh we served meal worm biscuits, crickets and cricket chips (in several flavours) and a taste of green ants (no they don’t taste like chicken, more like lime).
Most of the guests at the gorgeous WeWork offices at 1 Sussex Street, Barangaroo, were inspired by the courageous atmosphere Kaechele brought to the evening, to sample taste sensations.
Almost disappointingly they are not at all so strange tasting! Some likened the flavour to coconut and peanut butter.
For a few though the experience of edible bugs was a bit “too wild” .
The point was to shine a light on food security but also the solution of dealing with problems by turning them into something useful or beautiful.
In her video skit on getting rid of the salmon farms for instance, she takes the Trumpism rampant in the US during Covid (and still rampant), and uses the military aggression at its heart to aim missiles at the farms and blow them up. “These salmon farms are going down, boys,” she parodies suggestively, dressed as a military Chief of Staff discussing tactics with her armed forces who are clad just in their underwear, decorated with nationalistic symbolism.
Kaechele’s talk and slides veered from the zany to the heart-wrenching as she showed slides of the young people she worked with and tried to bring joy to in New Orleans. In a photo of five or six young men, she went through each by name: dead, dead, dead, dead. Just one remained.
It led to her innovative gun buyback program.
You can see why we were fascinated by this woman: she takes a problem and tackles it from angles you don’t expect.
Jess Miller, our MC for the night dubbed Kaechele as a Trojan horse for sustainability and equity.