Competitive spacing out: Can you out-nothing your fellow Melburnians?

Melburnians will be invited to enter a competition to find the best person at doing absolutely nothing, as the global hit public performance piece Space Out Competition comes to the city for the Rising festival in June.

Negotiations to bring the work from South Korean artist Woopsyang began two years ago. But on the day the program is launched for the 2025 festival, which was born out of the amalgamation of the old Melbourne International Arts Festival and White Nights from 2021, the future of Rising beyond this year remains uncertain.

Rising Festival organisers Gideon Obarzanek and Hannah Fox demonstrate the Space Out Competition.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Last June, this masthead reported that “a crucial five-year agreement with state government funding bodies Creative Victoria and Visit Victoria is yet to be secured, despite expectations that it would be finalised in December last year”.

Rising received almost $19.8 million in direct government funding in the 2022–23 financial year. According to a financial report filed in January 2025, that figure reduced to $14.64 million in 2023– 24 as the state grappled with straitened finances (the funding for 2022-23, however, also included contributions for White Night in Bendigo and Geelong).

Co-artistic directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek this week declined to confirm or deny that the government had agreed to back the festival beyond the current year.

“We can’t talk about government funding; it’s commercial in confidence,” said Fox. “But we’re very happy to be on and happening this year.”

“There is certainly an interest in the festival, and we are in the process of planning for the future,” said Obarzanek. “But we are not in a position to answer that.” Comment was sought from the Victorian Government.

Landing the Woopsyang piece, which will be open to the public and held in the central courtyard of QV on the King’s Birthday weekend, certainly conforms with the festival’s ambitions to activate the CBD’s shared spaces with mass public events.

“We think about new, we think about live, and we think about place, and those three things working together,” said Obarzanek.

First staged in 2014, Space Out Competition invites entrants to dress in a costume that somehow relates to their working life while completely eschewing any semblance of busyness. Entrants’ heart rates are monitored every 15 minutes while the audience votes for the best costume. The winner is selected based on a combination of aesthetic and (non) performance.

South Korean artist Woopsyang.Credit: Rising Festival

While there’s a clear sense of ironic fun to be had in the idea of competing to do nothing, Woopsyang insists the idea for the work came from a serious place – a sense of burnout she experienced while working as a painter in 2013.

“Weeks passed, and my canvas was still blank,” she said via email. “I was terrified. I thought my creativity had run out, and I felt deeply disappointed in myself. As time went on, I became anxious and guilty, and I couldn’t sleep.”

Researching burnout, she concluded: “It wasn’t that I lost my talent – it was that I had used too much energy. That’s when I started becoming interested in why burnout happens.”

In Korea, as in many other places, “spacing out” is often seen as a waste of time. “I wanted to change that perception by turning it into something valuable,” she said. “Nobody thinks sports are useless, right? In sports, people compete, and the winner becomes a hero. So, I designed the Space-Out Competition in a similar way – to make it seem productive and meaningful.

“From the moment we wake up to the moment we sleep, we are glued to our phones. Our brains never get a break,” she adds. “I believe that in today’s world, we actually need this kind of ‘useless’ time.”

The Seoul edition of the Space Out Competition Woopsyang created in 2014.Credit: Rising Festival

Other highlights of Rising 2025 include the previously announced Swingers, in which the upper reaches of Flinders Street Station will be converted to a mini-golf course designed by artists including American Miranda July and Australian duo Soda Jerk, and a laser installation by Shohei Fujimoto, formerly of renowned collective TeamLAB, that will turn the Capitol Theatre into “an immersive field of red beams that respond to your movement and perception”.

The music program for which the festival has quickly become renowned will be led by an Australian debut for British singer Suki Waterhouse, a solo show from Portishead singer Beth Gibbons, a concert in Maori language from Marlon Williams and choir, and the disco-tinged gospel sounds of Mississippi’s Annie and the Caldwells.

There will also be a return for the all-day city music festival Daytripper, centred in the Melbourne Town Hall, Max Watts and the surrounding laneways and arcades.

Rising will run June 4-15.

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