VII is the old way of counting to seven. That means Format has thrown a festival every year since 2008 and we think that’s great, even without all the cultural warmth this arts collective eminate. With that, it’s extra great.

Format is the glue that sticks to your conscience and conscious. It’s a perfect mismatch of all the outside ideas that the heaving mass of mainstream consumerism doesn’t want to consider. Their festival is an A-grade experience in weirdness.

Live music in venues that feel like anywhere but here.

Visual art that makes you feel simultaneously gross and transcendent.

A quiz night with James McCann.

And parties. Parties that acknowledge that the land upon which they revel were, “straight-up stolen from the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains”. And that despite the “cruel” and “unjust society” that the land now sustains we can still, “love each other, trust each other, celebrate that which is true, notice small kindnesses, forgive, laugh, hug, dance until the cops show up.”