ENDLESS ROMANTICA
Field Theory’s 24-hour tribute to Café Romantica celebrated its late-night culture and community.
(2018)
Endless Romantica was a 24-hour live work staged inside a constructed Italian restaurant, located in and around the Mechanics Institute in Brunswick, not far from the original café that inspired it.
The project was presented as part of the Next Wave Festival 2018 and ran continuously from the evening of 5 May through to 6 May.
The work emerged from Café Romantica on Lygon Street, which operated from the late 1990s through to the early 2010s. Over that time it had become a quiet but significant meeting point for a range of overlapping communities. Artists, hospitality workers, students, regulars and late-night visitors moved through it in different ways. It functioned as a workplace, a social space and a kind of informal support structure for conversations, collaborations and ongoing projects.
Nothing especially dramatic defined it, but a great deal accumulated there.
Café Romantica held people. It allowed things to unfold without needing to be named or formalised. It was somewhere people arrived for one reason and stayed for another. The relationships it supported were not always visible, but they were active.
Endless Romantica operated as a living memorial to that space.
Field Theory reconstructed a version of the café as a live environment and inhabited it continuously for 24 hours. The work unfolded across both the interior and exterior spaces of the Mechanics Institute, allowing movement between inside and outside, between a more contained setting and a looser public edge.
The space operated as both a constructed set and a functioning social environment. Food was prepared, drinks were served and conversations unfolded over time. Participants entered and left at their own pace. Some stayed briefly, others remained for longer stretches. The work did not clearly announce itself as performance, and this ambiguity allowed the space to operate somewhere between fiction and lived experience.
The work was performed by Field Theory, including Jason Maling, Lara Thoms, Sarah Rodigari, Martyn Coutts, Jackson Castiglione and Anna Schoo, with collaborators and invited participants moving through the space across the duration. As with many of the collective’s projects, the boundary between performer and participant was deliberately open. Presence itself became a form of contribution.
Presented and supported by Next Wave, the project sat within a broader context of experimental practice while maintaining a strong sense of informality. It focused attention on the conditions of being together over time, rather than on a fixed outcome.
As the hours passed, the structure shifted. Energy levels changed, conversations looped and drifted, and small details became more apparent. The act of hosting and the act of performing became increasingly difficult to separate.
The work explored hospitality as a form of practice. It considered how environments supported relationships, how narratives emerged through proximity and repetition, and how meaning developed through duration rather than event.
Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Melbourne
5–6 May 2018 (Next Wave Festival)
