Forget private jets, meet the performers who sail to their gigs

On the day I visit the Arka Kinari, the Carnival Splendor is also in town, taking on passengers alongside the Overseas Passenger Terminal. The contrast between the vast cruise ship’s 13-storey, 290-metre bulk and the modest 24-metre schooner tied up at a jetty at Campbells Cove could scarcely be greater.

“It’s awful,” says Arka Kinari skipper Grey Filastine, nodding at the massive ship towering over his vessel as he welcomes me aboard.

Grey Filastine and Nova Ruth aboard the Arka Kinari at Campbells Cove.Credit: Edwina Pickles

It’s as if the monumental party boat and the trim sailing vessel inhabit two entirely different worlds. But beyond the physical difference, the contrast in their respective missions is even more marked.

Since its 2019 relaunch, the Arka Kinari has roamed the world’s oceans, covering 50,000 nautical miles, bearing witness to the climate crisis and promoting a slower way of life with an idiosyncratic mix of environmental activism and performance.

Beatmaker and video artist Filastine is one part of the avant-garde music and performance duo Filastine & Nova. The other half is percussionist and vocalist Nova Ruth. As well as being home to Filastine, Ruth and the six crew, Arka Kinari is also their performance space. They have sailed between communities as far apart as the Caribbean and Pacific, staging free performances on board complete with video projections on the sails. During the day they conduct environmental workshops.

Filastine & Nova had already been together for about ten years, making a name for themselves on the international festival circuit, all the while questioning the environmental cost of the endless air travel.

The Arka Kinari is home, performance space and transport for the crew.Credit: Edwina Pickles

“We wanted to get our methods more in line with our message, and it took years of thinking and dreaming and scheming and planning and fundraising,” says Filastine.

“And then we decided we would build a ship.”

The original plan was to build a traditional Indonesian Pinisi, but they ultimately concluded the environmental cost of the timber needed was too much. Finally, in Rotterdam, they came across the 1947-built vessel they renamed the Arka Kinari. Arka means vessel while Kinari is a mythical half-bird, half-human musician.

Counterintuitively, even when they came to launch Arka Kinari in 2019, neither Filastine nor Nova had much of an idea about how to sail.

One of the multimedia performances on board the Arka Kinari. Credit:

“I was also never trained as a musician or as a video mapper,” says Filastine.

“I feel like you can learn most things if you apply yourself to it. And also we surrounded ourselves with people who are a lot more capable and learned from them. At this point, I’m the captain. It’s surprisingly fast in four years to go from not knowing port from starboard to captaining a 60-tonne vessel.”

Those four years, interrupted by the pandemic, have been a steep learning curve marked by all the drama and challenges one would expect from sailing such massive distances.

Four months ago, the crew set off from the southern Philippines, heading down the east coast for their date with the Sydney Festival (they will also travel to Hobart next month to perform at Mona Foma). Along the way, they were forced to flee Tropical Cyclone Jasper, hit by a freak tropical tornado that hurled the Arka Kinari onto a beach, and then lost a sail and other equipment in another storm. In the middle of all that, Filastine had an excruciating medical emergency, passing a kidney stone while at sea.

He admits he sometimes gets stressed and will occasionally “stress eat” his entire chocolate reserve.

The volunteer crew who have signed on for this eccentric performance/voyage are an eclectic bunch.

The Arka Kinari has covered some 50,000 nautical miles since 2019. Credit: Grey Filastine

“Some of them are old friends but some of them are people who kind of found their new home in this activism,” says Ruth. “So it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, I really want to sail, but it’s an art project, so that’s why this is also my home’.

“And a lot of them didn’t work out because it’s too intense for so many people, but a lot of them also stick around for the longest time. They’re about as crazy as we are actually.”

But as the climate crisis gathers terrifying pace, what difference can this slow art project really make?

“I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist, I’m not a researcher. But guess what? Facts are not convincing to anybody,” says Filastine. “They’re being ignored, or we’re just so buried in facts that we feel we just flail, and we feel like we have no way to respond to those facts. As artists, our responsibility isn’t to traffic in facts, it’s to traffic in emotions and feelings. That’s our work.

“There needs to be an artistic movement to speak about this ecological conflict, and it affects our heart, our feelings, and not our brain. And that’s the responsibility of artists. So that’s all we can do. It’s the best we can do, and it’s the only thing we can do. So how effective is it? We won’t know for a generation. Do we need to do it anyway? Yes.”

Free performances at Campbells Cove, The Rocks, January, 18 - 20, 8.30pm and at Mona Foma in February.

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