MoMa (MONA Market)

By now, you’ve come to expect feats of strange wonder from MONA First Lady Kirsha Kaechele and her team of talented misfits. This year’s MoMa is no different; but she’s expanded her horizons to take in our beloved – but grubby – River Derwent. At our first market for the year, we’re launching the River Derwent Heavy Metals Project: an ongoing art-science collaboration bent on tackling the problem of pollution in the River Derwent. Shocking but true, sections of our silvery behemoth (including around MONA) are contaminated with extremely high levels of heavy metals (mercury, lead, cadmium, copper and zinc – that’s one hot mess). This project – the brain-child of Kaechele – brings together talented peeps from around the planet, including the University of Tasmania, the Derwent Estuary Program, CSIRO, IMAS, Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA) Melbourne, the Alvar Aalto Foundation (Finland), the University of Texas (USA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). Oh. Em. Gee – what collective brain power! The basic idea is: let’s blast these metallic bad boys from here to kingdom come. But how? The aim is to reclaim the Derwent through creativity and innovation. Expect a thrilling mix of art and architecture, performance and design, science and ‘heavy’ cuisine. So make sure you come to the market to get your daily bread. And when we say ‘daily bread’ we mean a delicious, gastronomically ambitious, tasty tapas-style extravaganza of food, drink and entertainment, with music curated by MOFO overlord Brian Ritchie. It will all be a little strange – what do you expect? – including heavy-metal themed food, crockery and cutlery; radical colour-saturation (come and find out for yourself), mad dentists (ditto) and, for the adventurous, samples of species from the Derwent cooked with ingredients that sequester metals from your body. Make sure you try our changing themed menus too – there’ll be a feast of poisonous fare (quick! Alert The Mercury! Just kidding; the cuisine will also work as an antidote) and for our first market, we’re serving all black food to reflect our hard-core metal mood. Heavy.