What is Straight Out of Brisbane?
Straight Out of Brisbane is a multi-arts festival of independent and emerging arts, culture and ideas. It's on this year from December 2nd to the 12th.
SOOB is Queensland's largest gathering of young and emerging artists and creative industries practitioners.
The festival was started in 2002 by a community of emerging artists in reaction to the institutionalised and hierarchical nature of much of Queensland's cultural sector.
The goal of the festival is create a platform to build audiences, showcasing and professional development opportunities for south-east Queensland's young and emerging artists, artsworkers and creative entrepreneurs – especially in contemporary and emerging art practices not funded or supported by the broader cultural sector.
The 2003 SOOB Festival featured more than 620 local and inter-state artists and creative practitioners across 152 events. An estimated 8,000 people attended. This makes SOOB the largest festival of its type in Queensland, and the third largest in Brisbane as measured by numbers of participating artists and events.
What does independent mean?
SOOB is dedicated to excavating the best in Brisbane's independent cultural production.
By independent we mean art and culture that is not produced for
profit, is created outside of the framework of multinational corporate enterprise
or large-scale government-funded arts organisations, is promoting and fostering
DIY aesthetics or is excluded from mainstream public debate.
SOOB is also programmed independently. It is an artist-run and artist-programmed initiative. Unlike traditional arts festivals, we don't have an Artistic Director. Instead, we appoint a large number of content coordinators to review and curate the work of their peers. In this way, SOOB is able to encompass a far more diverse and representative program than traditional "capital A" Arts festivals.
Straight Out of Brisbane favours the DIY aesthetic and seeks to champion "bedroom art". We want to celebrate independent thinking, publications, music, performance, visual art, fashion, design, film-making, craft, dance and movement, public art, politically risky art and digital media of all kinds.
We're also exceptionally keen to include groups or collectives of independent artworkers, wherever we can find them.
Art collectives, artist-run spaces, discussion groups, online communities, small galleries, writers groups, independent record labels and publishers, and small businesses in the creative industries such as independent boutiques, galleries and record stores are all part of our ambit.
Straight Out of Brisbane also seeks to create a new critical culture that will inform and be informed by independent thinking and contemporary ideas and current events. Our aim is to improve the public climate for contemporary and independent arts and ideas, and to build policy platforms that speak from a non-Baby Boomer perspective.
Longer-term goals include building community infrastructure for the independent scene (for example, a community web server) that seeks to help independent artists and thinkers build careers on a sustainable basis.
A key longer-term goal is the creation of a new artist-run venue in the Valley that is cheap, accessible and supportive of independent and emerging arts.