April 2016

trouble 133

Art Gallery of South Australia | Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art | JamFactory | Carrick Hill | The Santos Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Garden Curated by Lisa Slade

Until 15 May 2016 Drawing inspiration from the ‘Wunderkammer’, those rooms or cabinets of wonder dedicated to the display of magical objects, the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art champions the contemporary artist as conjuror.

With attendant meanings and manifestations, including contemporary artists’ interests in the talismanic, in cultural rituals and material riddles, this exhibition offers the ‘Wunderkammer’ as a tool with which to both view the world and critique it.

IMAGE CREDITS (in order or appearance): Installation view featuring Kate ROHDE, Ornament Crimes, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Installation view featuring Tom MOORE, Bureau of Comical Ecologies, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Installation view featuring works by Hiromi TANGO, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

Installation view featuring Garry STEWART and Thomas PACHOUD, Proximity Interactive, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide. Installation view featuring Heather B SWANN, Banksia Men, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

The 2016 Adelaide Biennial is an Art Gallery of South Australia exhibition presented in partnership with the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, UniSA, and in association with the Adelaide Festival of Arts.

- adelaidebiennial.com.au

CONTENTS 2016 ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART: MAGIC OBJECT

Curated by Lisa Slade ...............................................................................

COMICS FACE

Ive Sorocuk ..............................................................................................

THE MADNESS OF ART: THE VENICE BIENNALE

Jim Kempner ...........................................................................................

TEASPOON FULL

Jan Price .................................................................................................

GUY MAESTRI: ROADTRIPS AND ROADKILL interview by Steve Proposch ..................................................................

CAM ROGERS: WRITING QUANTUM BREAK interview by Steve Proposch ..................................................................

APRIL SALON

Aceification .............................................................................................

FINDING THE ART IN PHUKET: POSSESSIONS, PIERCINGS & PROCESSIONS

Anthony S. Cameron ..............................................................................

02 15 16 17 18 30 38

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COVER: Tarryn GILL, Guardian figure 2015, mixed media (including foam, faux fur, LED lights), 46 x 40 x 30cm. Courtesy the artist. 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, UniSA, Hawke Building, City West campus, 55 North Terrace Adelaide (SA), until 15 May 2016 - adelaidebiennial.com.au Issue 133 APRIL 2016 trouble is an independent monthly mag for promotion of arts and culture Published by Trouble Magazine Pty Ltd. ISSN 1449-3926 EDITOR Steve Proposch CONTRIBUTORS Ive Sorocuk, Jim Kempner, Jan Price, Inga Walton, Anthony S. Cameron, love.

GET from AppStore FOLLOW on issuu & twitter SUBSCRIBE at troublemag.com READER ADVICE: Trouble magazine contains artistic content that may include nudity, adult concepts, coarse language, and the names, images or artworks of deceased Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. Treat Trouble intelligently, as you expect to be treated by others. Collect or dispose of thoughtfully.

DIS IS DE DISCLAIMER! The views and opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. To the best of our knowledge all details in this magazine were correct at the time of publication. The publisher does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions. All content in this publication is copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior permission of the publisher. Trouble is distributed online from the first of every month of publication but accepts no responsibility for any inconvenience or financial loss in the event of delays. Phew!

This comic first appeared in Trouble November 2011

art comedy series

The Venice Biennale Jim explores the Venice Biennale, the City of Love ‌ or is that Paris?

visit: themadnessofart.com/

Teaspoon Full It’s been passed down not like a WW2 sibling’s shrunken jumper to make ends meet in this then innocent country but a curio of words that squeezed between the searchlights under the wires holding its breath as if guilty its eyes night-wide in the memorized landscape of audible suction of trip-up tussocks and soft quiet weeds to the distant silk-mapped wood off-casting its weighty answer into the slush before the slit-eyed dogs drained the air for excitement.

After escape the curio waited for a post-war diplomacy - until weeping had been bandaged in tissue and boxed with faces of family never again to change expression then it spoke from the tongue of a guest in a pause of conversation when subject matter had thinned and coffee and chocolates had not yet been served.

‘Someone told me for the life of me I can’t think who that a woman in one of the POW camps had spread her daily ration of butter all over her face …’

Jan Price

Guy Maestri:

Roadtrips & Roadkill

interview by Steve Proposch photos by Kyle Ford

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“Working in the field makes you focus,” says Guy Maestri. “You’ve got elements that you’re working against. You’ve got time and light.”

Like many painters who work en plein air, Guy will often finish his works in the studio, where light is even and predictable and gaps in the composition, balance or colour that weren’t apparent in the field become more obvious. It is common practice for artists to gather detrius from the field as well – leaves, rocks, flora and fauna such as a dead moth or a cicada-shell – to take back to the studio for sketching, inspiration, or perhaps a still life. but since 2014 Maestri, a Sydney-based artist, has been taking this process to extremes.

“If you’re in the studio you can leave the work, come back, get distracted … you know, it’s just one of those things that if you’re in the landscape you need to deal with the problem that’s there, and deal with it efficiently and immediately. For me, it’s the best way to really capture a painting that has all the key ingredients.

Though, having said that, for the last week I’ve been trying to make paintings in the studio, just to get that bit of distance and stop being a slave to what’s there. So essentially I make work in the field, and it forces me to work fast and capture the bones of it, but sometimes I use that just as a starting point, then make work in the studio.”

As a result of this lifestyle Maestri does a substantial bit of running around between his Newtown studio and various bushy locations such as Hill End, Wilcannia and Broken Hill. He is currently in Hamilton, in western Victoria, as artist in residence at Hamilton Gallery, where an exhibition of his newest works and paintings of the local landscape opens on 21 April (until 15 May 2016).

“Even before I was a painter I had a fascination about the ecology of different areas, and the issues that come with using the land with agriculture,” he admits.

“I’m always keenly aware of how the landscape is being used, what issues there are, whether there are problems with feral goats, pigs, foxes or cats, or whether there are invasive weeds. Farmers are the ones who know what’s going on and the ones who deal with all of those issues first hand, so I really like talking to people, and it’s been something that I’ve introduced in my work over the last few years.”

Startlingly, this introduction has taken the form of various species of roadkill, which the artist has gathered and put on ice during his regular roadtrips to the countryside. These specimens travel back to the freezer in Guy’s inner-city studio, where they patiently await their eventual immortalisation in oils. > TOP: Wreck 2015, oil on linen, 51cm x 61cm. BOTTOM L to R: Feral no. 15 2015, oil on linen, 51cm x 61cm. Feral no.13 2015, oil on linen, 61cm x 71cm.

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“It was a natural progression,” says Maestri, “because wherever I went I came across an enormous amount of roadkill. It’s actually a way to understand what species are in an area, like a survey. If you see a lot of dead foxes then you know the place has got a real fox problem.

“Again, even before I began to paint, I would always stop and inspect something like a beautiful parrot or animal that was dead on the road, because it’s the only opportunity you ever get to handle something like that, and to understand the way that they’re made. They’re such exquisite things, and here was an opportunity to observe those things up close. But then after I took my fill of that beauty I’d just leave them there, on the side of the road, and then I’d get this … sense of loss, perhaps, that you have just a moment to observe this beautiful thing that’s dead.

“Painting it became a way of extending that moment. It’s also a form of documenting that area and observing what’s going on there. I’ve painted lots of native things and also lots of feral things, and you slowly build up a sort of catalogue of what’s around in an area.”

Travelling with other painters and friends such as Ben Quilty and Luke Sciberras adds another dimension to Guy’s work.

“Those two are quite responsible for getting me painting out in the field” he says.

“For many years my paintings – while they still addressed the same things – were all studio-based work, and were quite abstract in their nature; very, umm, lyrical.

But we used to hang out a lot and do a lot of drawing and stuff together, and I think Ben and Luke could see me struggling. Then I came to a bit of a turning point where I felt quite lost, and they got me out into the bush and said, ‘you just need to sit here and paint’. And that was exactly what I needed, just a very simple way of resetting what I was doing.

“It’s really lovely to have some friends and contemporaries who do what you do, and understand you, and who you can trust to throw your ideas and opinions at.

That’s been really important for me, because it can be an isolating existence.”

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From the moment he left the National Art School in 2002, Guy has been working as a full-time artist. He has won a Blake Prize, and has a Doug Moran, an Adelaide Perry and an Archibald notched in his belt besides. He has shown multiple times in both the Wynne Prize for Landscape Painting, and the Dobell Prize for Drawing. Yet it seems that none of these achievements have affected him. Guy is as thoroughly pleasant, humble, intelligent, funny and thoughtful a guy as you’d ever want to meet, and his achievements, he says, come from an uneven balance of ability mixed with a great deal of focus and hard work.

“I feel absolutely blessed to have been able to pursue, every day, the thing I want to pursue,” he says. “I was picked up by a gallery very soon after I left art school, and that gives you the immediate impetus to create work. But I was a boat-builder before I went to art school, and that taught me how to work hard and make things happen; how to start something and follow it through. The first paintings I made were about my experience in that environment – lots of seascapes and paintings of the harbour I used to work in – and you get to work on really elegant, beautiful old timber things as well. It’s quite refined and it makes you very handy, very capable, and you can do and fix and make things, which is again a great benefit in whatever field you end up working in. It taught me a lot about mould making, for example, which I have used a fair bit in the past, and I still muck around with a bit of sculpture. In terms of a trade it is a beautiful all-round trade.

“As a painter you have to be very self-directed. You leave art school and there’s no one telling you to do anything. While it shouldn’t be the case, there is this need to affiliate yourself with a gallery, and I see a lot of people who fall by the wayside because they just can’t work under their own steam. It can be debilitating, because you’re out on your own and you’ve got to self-initiate.

“I was actually at art school still when I entered a competition to do a mural of St. Vincent’s Hospital, and you had to do a maquette of the design of the mural, and they’d come and judge the maquette to see who would get the job to go and paint this ten-metre mural. And maybe it was a matter of me being over-keen, or maybe it was because my trade had taught me to do things, but I just made the whole mural, in my garage, and then I was like – ‘hey, here it is’ – on eleven, one metre long boards. I guess I took it as an opportunity to do work on that scale, whether or not it succeeded or was any good at all. So, I got that commission [laughs], and the guy who judged it suggested I go see this gallery, and tell them he sent me. So I think I was lucky that I had that kind of initial training in boat-building, and I was able to go on painting under my own steam and just keep working hard.”

EXHIBITIONS: Guy Maestri: Artist in Residence, Hamilton Gallery (VIC), 21 April – 15 May 2016 - hamiltongallery.org | Road Trip: Juz Kitson, Fiona Lowry, William Mackinnon, Guy Maestri, Jan Murphy Gallery (QLD), 19 April – 14 May 2016 janmurphygallery.com.au | Artist’s site - guymaestri.com

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Cam Rogers: writing

Developed by Remedy Entertainment Published by Microsoft Studios For Microsoft Windows and Xbox One Released April 2016

INTERVIEW by Steve Proposch

“I

nteractive fiction is the next stage in how people tell stories,” says Cam Rogers, and he would know.

For the last four years the Melbourne-born writer has been residing in Helsinki in Finland writing for Quantum Break. And that is, actually, a pretty big deal.

Quantum Break is a third-person shooter that makes heavy use of time travel and time manipulation. It is a Remedy Entertainment (Max Payne, Alan Wake) and Microsoft co-production, and proudly touted as the most expensive entertainment project in Finnish history. “It’s tied to a four-episode high quality television show that adapts in accordance to how the game is played,” explains Rogers. “Each player gets their own ‘director’s cut’ of the show based on how they play through the game, basically.”

Cam was recruited by Remedy in mid-2012 on the strength of his novel, The Music of Razors, which had received some good press from people like Neil Gaiman, and was shortlisted for the Aurealis Award. “That provided a few opportunities which eventually led me to Remedy,” he says. “Part of my screening process was writing a script for an Alan Wake scenario, so I figured I was being brought in for Alan Wake 2. Instead, it was for this third-person action-adventure time travel multimedia hybrid thing they were calling Quantum, and would later be called Quantum Break. It was just a high-level design document at that point. Sam [Lake] brought me up to speed, and his pitch for QB got me thinking straight away. It was ambitious. I’d started working on it before I even left the interview.”

Soon after landing the job Cam was landing in Helsinki. “You can’t work on a AAA game and not be in the building,” he says, “so I was in Finland the entire time. It’s a complex undertaking. Roughly 80-100 people worked on Quantum Break in Helsinki. The writing team was myself, Mikko Rautalahti and Tyler Smith, overseen by Sam Lake who is Remedy’s creative director. On the US side I can only guess at the number of people Microsoft had involved.

“There’s a lot of meetings, a lot of interdepartmental updates and negotiation and troubleshooting,” says Cam. “The studio itself is a multi-storey building, housing different departments, and we’re in there every day nailing things down, building the world and characters, sorting the plot, getting the gameplay right, and making sure game and story aren’t getting in each other’s way. The writing team was with each other every day, and for the first year we worked off multiple whiteboards and sheets of smart film, getting the thing to work.

Once we got to a point where we could actually start writing scripts – which I think was about 18 months in – it was more productive to not be in the building.

When that finally kicked off I spent a lot of time at home or in a local café.”

Faced with working up a huge number of possible storylines, Rogers and the team employed a range of collaborative methods. “Branching narrative – the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ model of the kind you find in Telltale Games – can be complex, but we were dealing with something an order of magnitude greater,” Cam admits. “Aside from telling a story that incorporates both conscious player choice and allowance for the differences that certain gameplay actions will have on story causality going forward, we also had to deal with time travel; specifically, the occasional opportunity to go back to events already experienced.

“We also had to abide by a core rule: closed loops, which is to say that once an action is taken that waveform collapses and cannot be changed. That’s where it got tricky. For example, you might say: ‘I’m going to go back in time and rob that bank.’ To which I’d say: ‘No you won’t, because you didn’t.’ And I’d be right.

We lived through the time period you refer to, you’re standing here right now sans a stolen fortune, so you demonstrably never robbed that bank, and no matter what actions you take to go back in time to make that happen, you’ll never do it ... because it never happened. A lot of time travel stories play loose with this kind of thing, because it’s a massive plotting headache, but we stuck

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with it. In the writer’s room we’d often be flowing well, getting the plot nailed, but inevitably one of us would say ‘uh …’ or ‘wait …’ and the rest of us would swear, and then listen as that person explained why the last half hour of work either didn’t make sense because of causality, or if we kept the new work we’d need to unplug and rewire the previous two episodes of content in order for it to make causal sense. It sounds like a nightmare, and it kind of was, but sorting out the puzzle of it was some of the most fun I’ve had as a writer.”

Cam has also written a novel for the QB franchise, released this month, that is set in an alternate timeline and titled Quantum Break: Zero State. “Zero State covers the same time period and key events as the game, but the novel is shaped by different choices and causalities to those presented in the game – some of which predate the game’s time period,” says Cam. “The result is a Quantum Break story that is both familiar and different; a story that deals with its own issues while shedding more light on questions and mysteries from the game. The novel has its own tension, different action set pieces, and goes to places that differ from what’s in the game while still dealing with those core Quantum Break conflicts.

“Sam Lake gave me a lot of freedom with telling this story,” Cam continues.

“And I’m grateful for that. You never know what you’ll get when you work with a new group of people, especially when such a big investment has been made

in a property like this, but for me the whole experience was very positive.

My contact on Microsoft’s end went over the manuscript to make sure it was consistent with the game, as did Sam. Micro-management never played into it, and the feedback was all solid and sensible.”

The video game industry turned over 46.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2014*. Games that have become notably MASSIVE recently have frequently done so through a much refined use of narrative, plot and character development, to a point beyond their primary purpose as tools for player motivation; beyond the next boss fight, to where players are as emotionally involved and affected by a masterwork of finely crafted gameplay as they might be by a work of art. It’s more than a game, and more than a movie. Thus, it’s more than both of those things put together. For the developers, that means exciting times ahead.

“It’s taken a few decades for the medium to get a handle on how it tells stories best,” says Rogers. “Games are different from movies, which are different from theatre productions, which are different from novels. Games needed time to find their own distinctive voice, and allowing the viewer to interact directly with the world of the story is a big, powerful part of that. It’s hard to not care about someone you’ve spent even a few minutes shaping, shepherding and safeguarding through a given storyline. I’ve been gaming most of my life and I’ve seen first hand how some games profoundly affect

* http://www.statista.com/statistics/237187/global-video-games-revenue/

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people, and change them. The Final Fantasy series reduces people to tears on a regular basis. Then there’s Mass Effect [Microsoft Studios, 2007] and The Last of Us [Naughty Dog, 2013].

“If you track where we’ve come from with distribution (bricks and mortar outlets, physical products, limited supply) to where we are now (fewer stores, the decline of physical media, instantaneous and on-demand supply), you can begin to imagine where we might go from here,” says Cam. “I think multiplatform releases are likely to become standard largely because the number of platforms will shrink, or because a single innovation will change the way we access content. One example could be the rise of a ‘Netflix For Games’, with the controller in your living room but the game being run on a state-of-theart machine on the other side of the world. This means hardware shrinks to a single device and the question becomes which game service you use.”

Rogers will be kicking it at home for his own forseeable future. “Now that I’m back in Australia I mainly work at the State Library of Victoria. It’s probably my favorite workspace anywhere in the world. I’m keen to get back overseas and collaborating again though, so I’m sorting through options. In the short term I’m happy to be back home, finishing my degree, guest lecturing at a couple of universities, working on my next novel and writing for The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, a game for mobile platforms that’s doing very well for itself.

QUANTUM BREAK STARS: Shawn Ashmore (X-men), Aiden Gillen (Game of Thrones, The Wire), Lance Reddick (The Wire, John Wick), Dominic Monaghan (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Lost). Released April 2016 - quantumbreak.com FURTHER RESOURCES: FIRST CHAPTER - http://www.tor.com/2016/03/07/excerptsquantum-break-zero-state-cam-rogers/ | TRAILER #1: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8_Yo6OhEmjs | TRAILER #2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4or8YE-6P4

april salon

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: Daniel Moynihan, Harold Wright’s Tinker Truck 2014 etching, drypoint, aquatint, sugarlift on 2 copperplates, Lana Royal paper, final state, edition 8/32, 60 x 90cm. Courtesy of the artist. © Daniel Moynihan. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016. The Art of Daniel Moynihan: Printmaking 1966-2016, Art Gallery of Ballarat, 40 Lydiard Street North, Ballarat (VIC), 9 April – 19 June 2016 - artgalleryofballarat.com.au 1. Irene BARBERIS, blow (detail) 2016, poly vinyl chloride, 120 x 900 cm. 2. Annette Iggulden, House of Reverie II 2015, acrylic, Ink, canvas, 40.5 x 51cm. Re Forming the line; blow cut melt: Irene Barberis & Home: a geometry of echoes: Annette Iggulden, Langford 120, 120 Langford Street, North Melbourne (VIC), until 17 April 2016 - langford120.com.au

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april salon

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: Deb MANSFIELD, The Armchair Traveller (two-seater) 2013, phototapestries upholstered onto a reproduction Louis two-seater frame, 93 x 130 x 70 cm.

Courtesy the artists and Galerie pompom, Sydney. Interiors / Exteriors, MOP Projects, 2/39 Abercrombie St, Chippendale (NSW), until 16 April - mop.org.au 3. Arabelle O’ROURKE, John XXIII College, Warren 2015, charcoal on plywood, 81.5 x 81 cm. Year 12 Perspectives 2015, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Cultural Centre (WA), until 13 June 2016 - artgallery.wa.gov.au 4. Annemieke MEIN, White Faced Heron 1979, textile, 155 x 115cm. Collection Gippsland Art Gallery. The Craft Revolution, Gippsland Art Gallery, 64-66 Foster Street Sale (VIC), until 12 June - gippslandartgallery.com NEXT SPREAD: Anders Nilsen, Captain American resting 2008, ink on paper, 125.7 x 95.3 cm. Collection the artist © Anders Nilsen. Comic Tragics: the exploding language of contemporary comic art, Art Gallery of Western Australia, , Perth Cultural Centre (WA), 9 April – 25 July 2016 - - artgallery.wa.gov.au

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FINDING THE ART IN

Phuket

POSSESSIONS, PIERCINGS and PROCESSIONS The Phuket Vegetarian Festival

by Anthony S. Cameron

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I ride through the dawn and make it to Bang Niow shrine by 6.30am, just as the first fireworks break the eerie quiet of the Phuket Town streets. The air is filled with the smell of sulphur and deep fried vegetarian treats, a heady combination on an empty stomach and a few hours’ sleep. I thread my way through the crowd towards the shrine where, in the courtyard, the devotees of this bizarre festival await their audience with the body piercer from hell.

Blood-soaked white cloths and plastic gloves lie scattered on the ground as I walk towards a group of foreigners with cameras held above their heads, snapping away at something. Around me the scene is surreal: men in ceremonial robes patiently awaiting their turn on the piercer’s conical spike, their fluttering eyes rolling upwards as the spirits of the gods possess them; others, having already been to the piercer, adjust the swords poking out of their cheeks, whilst three stand in a line running serated-edged swords across their tongues, their minders protecting them from wayward cameras and a hovering drone. Normally, these people would be opening their car dealership, furniture shop or restaurant by now; they would be sweeping their front steps, dusting their wares. But today they stand here shaking and staring up at the sky, waiting for the final piercing to be completed so they can begin the procession that winds through the city streets into the rising sun, amidst a cacophony of shrieks, explosions and frenetic drum beats.

Foreigners are everywhere, capturing this fascinating spectacle to send to gobsmacked western friends, balancing on any vantage point that will get them THE shot, the one that encapsulates it all. Inside the temple, incense is burning at a rate verging on intoxicating, giving my nostrils welcome relief from the acrid smell of the fireworks and the unexpectedly sweet stench of fresh blood.

I elbow my way politely through the throng of foreigners and eventually I can see what they have been feverishly photographing: the piercer at work. He is shorter and slighter than I imagined, not the beefy, sumo style guy I was picturing – shaved head, a hard and sort of crazy stare, a belligerent, slightly arrogant stature – no, this guy looks like he is shelling peas and having a gossip with the neighbours. He is wearing a white t-shirt and has the sort of haircut your mum would say looked ‘nice’. In his little hand is the stainless steel spike and he is coating it in baby oil as the next devotee sits down on the blood

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spattered chair next to him. The devotee’s minders brace him for what is to come whilst the piercer puts a texta mark on his cheek. The now sweating man lifts his head and looks to the sky as his eyes roll back and the spike makes its way through his cheek, carving a two inch slash in it like it isn’t even there. A drop of blood escapes the wound as the piercer retracts the spike and inserts a sword through the slash; all the way through until the handle is resting up against the devotee’s glistening cheek. The piercer then moves to the other cheek, punching a hole through it you could park a small car in. This cheek gets not one, but four swords of various sizes, their intricately curved handles jostling for position on the possessed man’s face.

The piercee doesn’t show even the slightest glimmer of pain. Instead, he seems to stare straight ahead, straight through his muted agony and out at the street and the lengthening line of pierced devotees awaiting the start of the procession.

Piercing is Bang Niow shrine’s specialty, and probably the most full-on to watch, but it isn’t the only sacred ritual that takes place during this festival. There is also the walking-barefoot-on-hot-coals, and the climbing-up-and-down-a-ladderembedded-with-razorblades at other shrines around Phuket. In addition to those you’ve also got your garden variety possessed people wandering around without piercings, without burnt or sliced feet, and they will be muttering in Hokkien, the predominant dialect spoken when the rituals began 150 years ago.

The story goes, that during it’s tin mining heyday of the mid 1800s, a mysterious, fatal illness swept through the mainly Chinese population of Phuket, affecting even a visiting Chinese Opera Company, here to entertain the miners. At a loss as to the cause, they eventually worked out that they had forgotten to pay homage to the nine emperor gods in the first nine days of the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar. Convinced that this was the reason for the epidemic, they sent one of the surviving opera singers to China to ‘invite’ the gods to Phuket. The following year, having paid homage to the nine gods, Phuketians also decided to refrain from eating meat, drinking alcohol, having sex, arguing, lying or murdering for nine consecutive days. These practices enabled spiritual cleansing and merit making, and were believed to bestow good fortune.

Miraculously, the epidemic stopped.

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Like with every great festival, each subsequent generation adds their own touches, personalising it in some way, leaving layers of cultural richness in their wake for future generations to add to. So these days at the Phuket Vegetarian Festival motorbike wheels get inserted through cheeks, turnbuckles through lips, engine parts in one side and out the other. I am anxiously waiting for the first iPhone to be seen poking out of a possessed face.

I am out on the street now as the procession makes its way out of the temple grounds amidst a hail of fireworks and drumming that makes my ears bleed and my trigger finger spasm involuntarily. Next thing I know I have taken over a hundred photos in a matter of minutes, and find myself at the back of the crowd, resting up against a shopfront wall.

I sense someone next to me, turn and smile at a young Thai woman who is smiling back at me. As the procession passes in a cloud of grey smoke and shards of red paper, I notice the woman’s posture change out of the corner of my eye. I turn and watch with surprise as her head tilts backwards and her eyes roll upwards into her skull. She starts shaking, little tremors that seem to end at her fingers, and she is moaning and muttering to herself. She looks like an old lady now, staring towards me with unseeing eyes. She is holding her hands out to me but, before I can take them, two women dressed in white run towards her and grab her outstretched hands. One of them puts an apron-like ceremonial cloth over her head, then they lead her firmly towards the street and, just like that, she enters the fold and is gone.

I stand there, dumbstruck for a moment, before the scene I have just witnessed clicks into place in my mind. This woman had seemed compeltely normal moments before, was now in another realm altogether. I hadn’t been aware that possessions could happen so quickly. Maybe it was a last minute inter-relam booking? I wasn’t sure. About the only thing I was sure of, was that this little moment was going to end up in the poolroom too.

ANTHONY S. CAMERON is an Australian ex-pat living in Phuket, Thailand, and the author of two novels, Driftwood (2014) and Butterfly on Bangla (2015).

Born in Melbourne, he escaped in his early twenties to central Victoria, where he designed and built a sustainable house, raised two sustainable children. His books are available on Amazon here.

IMAGE CREDITS: title spread 2011 Vegetarian festival in Phuket! Jui Tui Shrine street procession.

Via Wikimedia Commons. Author Joseph Ferris III. All other pics by Tony Cameron.