Vanitas 

Experience the Sunshine Coast's premier multi-arts festival.Horizon Festival connects artists, industries, communities and audiences through an award-winning celebration of arts and culture.We bring local, national and international artists together for 10 arts-fuelled days of visual art, music, words + ideas, film, fashion, art + tech, performing arts, street art and creative workshops.Horizon Festival would like to acknowledge the traditional Country of the Kabi Kabi and the Jinibara Peoples of the coastal plains and hinterland of the Sunshine Coast.

Horizon Festival

Take a walk amongst the graves of Caloundra Cemetery guided by Vanitas, an immersive app experience that mixes real life documentary with touching speculation about the fate that awaits us all: death.
Experience beautifully blended original music and contemplative voices of cemetery workers, cremator operators, historians and botanists through your own smartphone and headphones. As you begin to wander, you will receive text messages and directions from the elusive person you are destined to meet. Told through the secret language of flowers, and explored by two friends, Vanitas invites deep connection to the world of the cemetery which is at times bewildering and meditative.
As the name suggests, the work explores the idea of a ‘vanitas’, a type of still life painting from 16th and 17th century Europe. Vanitas paintings served as a reminder that beauty fades and all living things must die. Depicting the everyday possessions of a person, the paintings served as a momento mori, to warn of the vanity of accumulating wealth. The message is the same today as it was then: your worldly possessions will outlive you and you can’t take them with you. Now, we have made a vanitas experience for the most treasured possessions of our times: smartphones.
The smartphone interface and central metaphor of Vanitas is a painting: ‘Vase with Flowers’ (1700) by Rachel Ruysch. Each flower in the painting is an episode in the Vanitas experience, which can be unlocked in 216 variations, taking each audience member on their own unique journey through the cemetery.
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Vanitas is funded by the Regional Arts Development Fund, a partnership between the Queensland Government and Sunshine Coast Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.

Caloundra Cemetery

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Vanitas

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Vanitas

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