Throw a Long Prawn on the Barbie: There’s a Huge Public Barbeque in Fed Square

Melbourne Fringe always offers plenty of food for thought, but this year’s festival serves up some actual nibbles too. The theme for 2024 is “Eat Your Art Out” and the program highlights the intersection of food and art as communal experiences that have the capacity to nourish and transform.

The centrepiece commission is Cooked, a pop-up public barbeque at Fed Square developed by Long Prawn, a creative Melbourne duo known for their high-concept dinner parties and eccentric cookbooks – such as Fat Brad, an investigation into all the food Brad Pitt has eaten on film, and Devils on Horseback, an illustrated etymology of dishes with non-descriptive names.

For over a decade, Fred Mora and Lauren Stephens have been playing with food and ideas beyond the confines of the hospitality industry. Cooked is their biggest project yet. “It’s really a festival within a festival,” Mora tells Broadsheet.

Running from October 1 to 20, Cooked includes a mix of artful sit-down dinners, free ticketed events with a snack and a show, and drop-in open grill sessions where anyone is welcome to step up to the hot plate. Punters can bring their own goodies to grill, or Long Prawn will supply hourly drops of free sausages and veggie sticks – as well as some provocations. “It will be free-range to an extent, but we also want to facilitate those conversations around the grill that we think are really interesting,” Mora explains.

All this takes place in a weatherproof space designed by Mikhail Savin Rodrick Projects and Long Prawn, with the barbeque at the heart of it all designed and built by installation artist Mike Hewson. Melburnians young and old will know Hewson’s work, as he designed the intriguing Rocks on Wheels public art playground in Southbank, which rewards risk and exploration while paying homage to its namesake, a 1962 artwork by photographer Diane Arbus.

Cooked similarly blends pleasure and playfulness with artistic rigour. From Paul Hogan’s infamous “shrimp on the barbie” tourism ad to the cult anticolonial satirical film BabaKiueria, there’s no doubt that the public barbeque has a particular significance in the Australian imagination. Long Prawn relishes drawing from all of that cultural baggage, while also serving up something fresh.

“Cooked – the hot plate stage – is a coming together of all the things we think are great about public barbecuing,” Mora says. “And we say ‘public barbecuing’ as opposed to backyard barbecuing, because to us public barbecuing opens up a much more exciting coming together of different cultures and foods and uses of this very democratic public space. They’re kind of a unique thing; a lot of people are taken aback that they’re free and that they’re in these iconic locations.”

Like playgrounds and libraries, barbeques are among a diminishing number of free public facilities in a world where shared space is often privatised. “But while that might seem like a wonderful, generous offering, the only reason they’re free is because they used to get robbed all the time,” Mora says.

Democratic chaos is part of the creative recipe. “We wanted to create a public artwork that brings together the real essence of a public barbeque, and to us that is crazy and disconnected and disparate ideas coming together on the grill,” Mora says. “We love the idea that often at these public barbeques, there’ll be a packet of Twisties next to something that’s been beautifully homemade … We really love those fringe food areas that exist outside of the standard hospitality space.”

It’s in this spirit that the Cooked: Hot Nights – Indecisive Cinema event embraces crowdsourcing in both its cinematic and culinary offerings. Audience members will be able to select bite-sized film excerpts and also nominate ingredients to go into a sausage maker. The night is a collaboration between Dudo Wook of Korea’s Steak Films (“another storied barbeque culture”, Mora says) and Long Prawn, which also allows for a questionable pun on surf and turf. Wordplay seems as much a constant feature of Long Prawn’s events as food, with previous events titled Gutful and Break an Egg.

As for what else is on the menu for Long Prawn, the pair strive to continue working in a multifaceted, research-informed way that steps beyond the confines of both the hospitality industry and the art world. “We didn’t study either,” Stephens says. Floating between the two gives them more room to grow.

They’re also proud of resisting the pressures of an Instagram-driven landscape to think beyond visual spectacle and short-lived market trends. “A lot of food that falls into that art category doesn’t consider waste, for example,” Mora says. “We hope to say a bit more and allow for a conversation that’s not purely visual.”

Cooked runs October 1 to 20 in Fed Square. For more information and tickets, head here.

This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.