Black
Start
Start
Culture Station is a new independent arts and culture social enterprise based in Sydney. We are in the development and funding stage, building toward a permanent multi-arts venue and cultural precinct that unites live music, performance, installation, ideas, nightlife, and community under one roof.
While we work toward that permanent home, we are developing a series of events and temporary activations that prove our model and platform. These projects are built around atmosphere, tension, sound, light, and the feeling of stepping into something completely outside ordinary life – immersive, high-energy, impossible to ignore.
Culture Station’s practice sits between immersive art, underground culture, temporary architecture, nightlife, and social experience. We build environments audiences move through rather than simply observe – spaces that feel alive, unpredictable, and shared.
Culture Station is led by Managing Director Perran Costi and supported by a board and network of collaborators spanning the arts, media, technology, and social enterprise sectors. Together, we are building new independent cultural infrastructure for Sydney – ambitious, accessible, and bold.
Perran Costi
Perran has spent three decades producing independent events, festivals, and immersive cultural environments across Sydney and internationally. As founder of Good Space – an interdisciplinary pop-up cultural hub – he built an entirely artist-led creative ecosystem that blurred the line between venue, artwork, and nightlife culture.
As Curator and Design Director of Underbelly Arts, he helped define independent artist-led culture in Sydney through projects grounded in experimentation, collaboration, and creative risk. His broader practice has included international residencies in Tokyo, Milan, and New York, and works presented at the Art Gallery of NSW, MCA Australia, Sydney Opera House, Carriageworks, and Cockatoo Island.
Eric Holowacz
Eric brings over three decades of international experience across experimental festivals, museums, public art, creative placemaking, and artist-led cultural programming. He has directed major cultural centres and festivals across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States – including Cairns Festival, Creative Bay of Plenty, and the Studios of Key West – leading a $7.4 million venue expansion project and delivering the Blue Mountains City
Council’s 2020–2027 Creative Strategy. His work consistently operates at the intersection of radical creativity, public participation, and social transformation.
Kym Middleton
Kym is an award-winning journalist, curator, and producer with a career spanning editorial leadership, live programming, screen production, and digital strategy. She has produced and hosted live panels for Melbourne Writers Festival, For Film’s Sake, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, IQ2 Australia, and Vivid Ideas, and held senior roles at ABC, SBS, the Walkley Foundation, and the City of Sydney — where she convened public program streams and developed event branding still in use today. She is a United Nations Media Peace Prize recipient.
Harvey Sanchez
Harvey brings over 30 years of senior executive experience, including leadership roles at Microsoft, eBay, and Accenture, combined with a lifelong passion for the arts and creative communities. He has held CEO and CMO roles across technology, media, and entertainment, and actively supports cultural and entrepreneurial initiatives through advisory and board roles, including The WEST Journal and Givar.
Georgina Hannekum
Georgina brings over 30 years of experience across media, technology, and publishing, with senior leadership roles at Bauer Media Group, Clemenger BBDO Sydney, and Better Known. Alongside her corporate career, she founded Bug Records – a fiercely independent record label supporting emerging Australian electronic music artists.
BLACK START brings together a core group of artists, practitioners, and creative collaborators whose work spans immersive installation, projection, sound, movement, and spatial transformation. These are some of the people who will bring the activation to life.
Allan Giddy
Internationally recognised public artist, installation practitioner, and pioneer in the use of sustainable energy systems and light within immersive sculpture and interactive environments. Allan’s work fuses light, sound, circuitry, renewable energy, interactivity, architecture, and public participation into large-scale sensory experiences that behave more like living systems than static artworks.
Founder of the Environmental Research Initiative for Art (ERIA) at UNSW, Allan has exhibited internationally including at Tate Modern and ISEA, and across major public art and media arts programs in Australia, Germany, Finland, Canada, Greece, Vietnam, Ireland, China, the UK, and New Zealand.
His works explore interconnectivity, environmental systems, social participation, and speculative futures through immersive public experience. His practice sits somewhere between experimental engineering, environmental activism, public ritual, immersive installation, and post-industrial science fiction.
allangiddy.org
Illuminart
One of Australia’s leading immersive projection and spatial storytelling studios, known for transforming architecture, industrial environments, and public space into large-scale sensory experiences through projection mapping, light, sound, interactive media, and cinematic environmental storytelling.
Their work spans major festivals, public art commissions, underground activations, and large-scale site-responsive experiences that dissolve the boundary between audience and environment. Rather than treating projection as decoration, Illuminart reimagines buildings and spaces as living cinematic organisms capable of transformation, disruption, and collective wonder.
Machine Hall is exactly the kind of environment their practice is built for – raw, industrial, and charged with the kind of spatial drama that rewards transformation rather than decoration.
illuminart.com.au
Sela Vai
Award-winning Tongan-Australian choreographer, movement director, performer, and multidisciplinary creative whose work combines choreography, immersive performance, embodied storytelling, underground club energy, ritual movement, fashion, music, and large-scale spatial activation.
Her work has been presented through the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the Biennale of Sydney, TEDx Sydney, Sydney Fringe, Melbourne Fringe, and Adelaide Fringe, with commercial collaborations including Apple, Tones and I, MECCA, and Thelma Plum.
Sela’s practice dissolves the boundary between choreography, nightlife, ritual, and immersive audience experience. Rather than treating movement as stage-based presentation, she activates entire environments through tension, rhythm, embodiment, and collective emotional charge.
selavai.com
Rudy Grakk
Visual artist, builder, installation-maker, fabricator, and underground creative force working across immersive environments, sculptural intervention, spatial transformation, DIY architecture, and experimental event culture.
Rudy’s practice combines raw materiality, handmade construction, industrial aesthetics, improvised engineering, underground rave sensibilities, and large-scale environmental manipulation to create spaces that feel simultaneously post-industrial, ritualistic, chaotic, cinematic, and deeply human.
His work often exists somewhere between installation, temporary architecture, immersive theatre set, and underground club environment. He brings a tactile, physical, built-by-hand energy to Black Start that anchors the project firmly within independent maker culture rather than polished commercial spectacle.
instagram.com/rudy_grakk/
Luke Dearnley / Sub Bass Snarl
Luke Dearnley has been a fixture of Sydney’s underground electronic music scene since 1991, when he emerged at the onset of rave culture and pioneered a decks-and-effects setup that put him ahead of the curve from day one. Over three decades he has performed at more than 1,000 events – from underground parties and clubs to galleries and festival stages – including five Big Day Out festivals and Vibes On A Summer’s Day, as well as shows in Tokyo, Osaka, San Francisco, London, and New Zealand.
His live history reads like a who’s who of experimental and underground electronic music, having supported Shackleton, Surgeon, Squarepusher, The Bug, Clark, Coldcut, Meat Beat Manifesto, Scanner, David Toop, and many more of the most significant acts to tour Australia over the past three decades. Versatile, visceral, and deeply rooted in the culture he helped build.
For BLACK START, Luke brings that same raw energy and three decades of underground instinct to Machine Hall – grounding the activation firmly within the physical intensity and communal spirit of Sydney’s independent electronic music culture.
snarl.org/v3
Perran Costi
Perran Costi is a multidisciplinary artist and immersive world-builder whose practice spans installation, sculpture, immersive environments, public art, performance, nightlife, and participatory social experience – transforming forgotten or transitional spaces into emotionally charged worlds that feel somewhere between dream-state architecture, underground gatherings, and temporary autonomous zones. His projects behave less like static exhibitions and more like living sensory ecosystems that audiences move through physically and emotionally.
His work has been exhibited and presented internationally across Tokyo, London, New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Brussels, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Hong Kong, Singapore, Toronto, Milan, Hamburg, and Seattle, as well as more than 20 locations across Australia – primarily through his installation series Skyboxes, which toured nationally through the Contemporary Glass Art Tour.
A recurring thread throughout his work is the belief that culture itself can function as a vehicle for change – a living system capable of reconnecting people through shared sensory experience, imagination, participation, and collective emotional energy. His practice has always maintained strong roots in DIY culture, warehouse events, and underground creative communities.
perrancosti.com
These are three examples from the people behind Culture Station. Collectively, our team has produced, directed, and contributed to hundreds of events, festivals, exhibitions, residencies, and cultural programs across Australia and internationally – spanning independent artist-run spaces, major institutions, community radio, public art, and large-scale festival production.
Good Space Festival
Good Space was an interdisciplinary cultural hub conceived and led by Perran Costi – part gallery, part music venue, part bar, part installation environment, part community gathering point. Delivered across two editions, each running for several months, it was a genuinely artist-led space where musicians, performers, designers, and audiences collided organically outside institutional structures.
What made Good Space distinctive wasn’t any single event or program – it was the model. Rather than operating as a traditional venue for hire, it functioned as a living creative ecosystem: constantly evolving, deliberately unpredictable, and built around the idea that culture happens best when the boundaries between artist, audience, and environment dissolve. Programming spanned immersive installation, live music, performance nights, workshops, and social gatherings – often happening simultaneously across the same space.
Good Space demonstrated something we’re now building into Culture Station at a larger scale: that independent, artist-led cultural infrastructure can be financially sustainable, community-driven, and genuinely exciting – without institutional backing or commercial compromise.
Testimonials:
“Good Space brings together forward-thinking artists across music, technology, and art. Good Space brings together forward-thinking artists across music, technology, and art. I’ve had the pleasure of performing there as a DJ – and what struck me most was how it created a genuinely safe, inclusive space while pushing the boundaries of how artists merge technology and live experience. It’s a space that celebrates music, art, and people from all walks of life without compromise.
Good Space has real capacity to elevate Sydney’s nightlife by championing a diverse range of artists who reflect the city’s creative future. Perran’s ideas are ambitious – but he has the vision, the network, and the track record to deliver on them.”
– Krystel Diola – Cultural Producer, Content & Community
“Through personal experience, I am confident in Perran’s capabilities to pull off Good Space, as he has proven on his original engagement projects in the past. I clearly see the crossover between Perran Paractic and The Environmental Research Initiative for Art’s goals, as we both work to activate space through the inclusion of public art and energy systems. This exciting opportunity is one that we are keen to enrich. We are enthusiastic in our support and wish Perran all the best in this endeavour.”
– Allan Giddy – Director ERIA (The Environmental Research Initiative for Art) Art & Design, University of New South Wales
“Bateria 61 performed two shows at Good Space – and for most of us, it was the highlight of the year. Bateria 61 performed two shows at Good Space – and for most of us, it was the highlight of the year. The festival far exceeded what we thought a grassroots artistic community in Sydney could deliver, bringing genuine joy and a sense of belonging to hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Good Space was one of the best events this city has seen in a decade – and exactly the kind of proof that there is still real creative life in Sydney.”
– Geoff Reynolds – Director, Bateria 61
“In my capacity as a broadcaster, DJ, booker and programmer, I had the pleasure of presenting two core events at Good Space during their Autumn season in The Rocks. Recovery On The Rocks Part 1 & 2 succeeded in attracting arts and music aficionados as well as the general public passing by, reanimating community and creativity in Sydney at an iconic location during a critical window in time.
Good Space has a proven capacity to conjure cures from the most modest resources at the most terrible of times. I both commend them to you and again offer my services as a curator, selector and facilitator.”
– Jack Shit, Presenter, FBi Radio
Cairns Festival – 50th Edition
When Eric Holowacz was appointed Producer and Team Lead of Cairns Festival, he inherited a long-standing community celebration in need of creative reinvention. Over three seasons, he rebuilt it from the ground up – establishing a new brand identity, assembling a festival team, and developing a bold artistic direction that reflected the unique cultural identity of Far North Queensland.
Each season comprised over 100 events across 17 days, drawing audiences of more than 100,000 people. Eric developed innovative community engagement programs, including Opening Notes TNQ, a pioneering Festival Artist in Residence program, and Posters to the People – as well as unexpected creative partnerships with Woodford Folk Festival and La Mama Theatre in Melbourne that brought national-calibre work into a regional context.
The 50th edition of Cairns Festival – produced under Eric’s leadership – was described by arts leader Roz Pappalardo as delivering “a complex multi-arts festival season unlike any ever attempted in Far North Queensland.” It established a new benchmark for what a community-rooted, independently spirited regional festival could be.
Testimonial:
“Having Eric Holowacz as the Manager of Cairns Festival has meant a great deal to the flourishing of the Cairns performing arts community.
As well as bringing a welcomed feast of inspiring new work from national and international stages – to nourish FNQ’s often isolated arts practitioners – his support for local works and artists has contributed to a growing respect for the arts in the Far North region.
Many local artists and arts workers have gained employment and received presentation and performance opportunities through his artistic direction and engagement with the sector.
Eric collaborates personably and respectfully with artists and the community. He offers leadership and creativity while capably drawing together a highly complex season of culture and entertainment for the Festival. He clearly values local practitioners’ knowledge and development in his performing arts programming, and supports their development with bold initiatives like the Arts Leaders’ Lunches, Artful-E newsletter, Opening Notes, the Lush Cabaret, a highly successful free music series, and so much more.”
– Avril Duck – Playwright, Director & Arts Leader
Vivid Ideas / City of Sydney Public Programming
Kym Middleton has produced and hosted live public programming for Vivid Ideas – Sydney’s annual festival of ideas, innovation, and creativity, and one of the largest events of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Vivid Ideas attracts tens of thousands of attendees across its run, with a program spanning keynotes, panels, workshops, and immersive experiences that draw international speakers and local practitioners together around the ideas shaping culture, technology, and society.
Producing for Vivid Ideas requires a specific kind of skill: the ability to shape intellectually rigorous content into live experiences that hold a room, managing speakers, format, audience flow, and the unexpected – all while maintaining the editorial quality that gives the festival its reputation. Kym brought exactly that. Her background as a senior producer at ABC News 24, managing rolling coverage of major global events across presenters, correspondents, and production teams, gave her the live instincts to match her editorial judgment.