Dark Mofo: Beetle to torch whatever bugs you

A 200kg giant beetle filled with 15,000 worries will go up in flames in one of the great traditions of Hobart’s winter festival.

Lansdowne Crescent Primary School students Abby Cameron and William Claridge with The Purging art installation. Picture: Chris Kidd

A 200kg giant beetle filled with 15,000 worries will go up in flames on Sunday night in one of the great traditions of Hobart’s winter solstice festival, Dark Mofo.

Festivalgoers have been invited to write down their fears on pieces of paper for art installation The Purging and put them inside the five-metre papier-mache Bruny Island Mt Mangana stag beetle – a local spin on a Balinese Hindu purification ritual totem.

William Claridge, 9, attended a workshop around the ogoh-ogoh (the traditional name for the statue) with his classmates from Hobart’s Lansdowne Crescent Primary School on Friday and said the exercise of writing down his fears made him “feel a bit nervous”. “I’m worried that my house’s roof is not going to stop leaking,” Claridge said. “It’s been leaking for about six months. They will be burning the beetle so all our fears get burnt away.”

The exhibit is one of the free offerings in this year’s streamlined one-week event that kicked off on Wednesday, following the cancellation of the 2020 festival due to the pandemic.

Dark Mofo creative director Leigh Carmichael said on Friday that while there was “still an air of anticipation walking the streets at night” and excellent community atmosphere at festival hubs “the mood does seem more subdued than a pre-Covid festival, a combination of the smaller capacity venues, miserable weather, and we are missing our Melbourne friends”, with Tasmania’s Covid-19 border closure to metropolitan Melbourne still in place.

“The most noticeable difference is that we are missing our late-night parties,” he said.