Just go nuts

From lofty rafter to breezy thoroughfare, the space - with the rest of the venue - will be crammed with more than 200 of Sydney's experimental and emerging artists when the indoor winter arts fringe festival takes over. The visitors are bringing a mountain of unfinished plays, imagined installations and even donated ideas with them.

"We're using every single corner," director Imogen Semmler says, looking around the room. "We've got projects on all the top levels there, we've got stuff happening in that little booth up Where, we've got down all of the corridors.

"We're really pushing this place to the max in terms of filling it."

For the second year running, the festival aims to become the temporary ground zero for the city's artistic community. From Thursday until July 10 (the ticketed festival weekend with performances and other entertainment is on July 12 and 13), the space will serve as an arts lab for participants, with the public invited along to watch every night free as their ideas develop.

"We had mums and dads, students, kids, all your art crowd [visit last year] - a totally different cross-section of people, which is lovely, and it gives artists a really diverse audience to show their work," Semmler says.

The program includes an evening of talks and a twilight arts bazaar.

"We're just saying to everyone: 'Look, it's a chance for us to take over this space for two weeks and go nuts in it.'"

Tessa Rapaport, Karl Logge and Diego Bonetto are one collective planning to take redesigning their new home seriously with their project, The Hanging Gardens.

The installation they are planning relies on borrowed pot plants from the centre's neighbours - complete with a letter of introduction - to help "invade" the industrial space of CarriageWorks and celebrate some of the stories of the area.

"I just wanted to see things hanging from these huge industrial struts," Logge says, looking around the room.

Already enlisted are two palms left homeless after the nearby Redfern Hotel closed.

"It was kind of a significant place in Redfern and they were just left on the side of the street," Rapaport says.

One of the key ideas of the flora forum is that plants, like community, respond to care and attention. Logge says: "As we get plants, we'll arrange them and the different plants will rub shoulders with different plants from the neighbourhood. They might swap and meet other plants from perhaps potentially streets and streets away."

Semmler says the establishment of new collaborations (of people as well as African violets) is an objective of this year's event.

"A lot of projects this year have come about through artists who met last year who went: 'Hey, I really want to work with you, let's think of something really fun to do next year.'"

"All I know is what's written on the application, and the beauty of this event is that projects evolve."

Performers Adriano Cappelletta and Holly Austin, who will develop a play called Cubbyhouse, say the festival is a rare chance to create a work for fun without keeping an anxious eye on potential ticket sales.

"We can actually just present this work, and it might not be in the best form or the final form ... but it's at this stage of development and we can get feedback from an audience and other artists and develop it further," Cappelletta says. "There's not many times where you get to do that."

The NIDA graduates, who previously toured festivals with their Connie Chang's Cabaret Roadshow, hope the work developed as part of Underbelly will be only the beginning.

Austin says: "In a city like Sydney, which can be filled with stainless steel bars and feel a little bit soulless, to come into a festival where the whole space is just taken over with musicians and actors and artists creating, I think it's fantastic. And for us as artists it's really important."

Underbelly: Public Arts Lab and Festival

Thursday to July 13, CarriageWorks, Redfern.

The public lab is free; tickets to the festival on July 12 and 13 are $28-$58 on 1300 723 038.

Photo: Edwina Pickles - Blow your own horn ... Cubbyhouse stars Holly Austin and Adriano Cappelletta.