Riding with Harley: an Interview with 2024 Trinacria Artist Harley Hefford
The Festival Residency team from 2024, including the author, Andrew Simon (in bear ears, second from left, bottom row), and Harley Hefford (top row, center, in sunglasses). Photo by Anna Finocchiaro.
by Andrew Simon
We’re making a connection between an island and a continent on opposite sides of the world. It’s not easy. We’ve got a twelve hour time difference and it feels like we’re pushing the capacity of FaceTime to its limit.
When we were in Pezzolo together, we’d wake up, drink coffee, chat, and one thing would lead to another, but two years later, Harley Hefford and I are reconnecting and we have more planning to do for this conversation than the ones where we greeted each other as we welcomed another day in paradise together at Trinacria.
Harley has been crushing it since our festival residency in 2024. He’s started running a venue in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, and once the connection is strong enough, he gives me a full tour of all five levels. The space has seven themed rooms, six bars, and a train on the roof. It’s called Trainscendence and all of the rooms are available to rent for events and programs. There’s comedy, live music, film, workshops, club nights, pop-ups, art openings, trivia, and way more. The link to the website is here - this place looks so sick.
After the tour, he sits down to get ready for the work day while I grab a coffee to stay up late. In Pezzolo, we collaborated on a presentation on the soccer field of a new album he created called Persona Acqua Luna and the following night, in the piazza, of a show I wrote about a family of bears called Orsi Stasera! (Bears Tonight!). His performance as the Bears’ favorite weekly variety show host, Flip Durango, was incredible, and he also created huge pieces of visual art and masks for us to wear to accompany the music event, which he concluded with a DJ set. I knew how varied his talents and interests were and it was surprising and fulfilling to see them taking form and shape in this way - as a facilitator and producer for other creatives and in a brick and mortar building with a train on top of it.
Post-Pezzolo, Harley had planned to do a visual arts masters program in Europe and enrolled in a four-year painting school in the Netherlands. But after Trinacria he’d had a “multiple chaos” kind of time - the course was expensive and he started feeling homesick and realized how much community he had in Melbourne. He came back to Australia and found out that a historic building in town was available for rent so he called a friend and for the last eighteen months they’ve been running what’s been called a “creative wonderland” that’s quickly becoming a major part of Melbourne’s arts and nightlife scene.
As I’m listening, I’m nodding and looking out the window of my house on an island in Maine, at a barn next door that I turned into a theatre. This feels familiar in all of the most challenging and most rewarding ways. For ten years, I ran a residency program called Barn Arts, out of a barn that used to be my grandmother’s antique shop. The experience was empowering and draining and intense and wonderful - sometimes all at once.
I tell Harley about a show I wrote, inspired in part by this experience, called The Petra and Mo Show. Mo is a mouse with a treehouse, who’s growing a garden and Petra is a giraffe who arrives on a hot air balloon. Together, and with help from the audience, they make a show, but when they start planning for the next one, Petra needs to leave and Mo needs to stay. I tell Harley that since I wrote this show, I’ve often measured my life in Mo energy and Petra energy - the instinct to be grounded, developing community, and putting down roots vs the instinct to travel, explore, find new friends, and seek out inspiration.
At Trinacria, we met in a Petra place, but his work at Trainscendence is giving big Mo energy. The work of the host can at times be unglamorous and invisible, but it’s always essential. A visitor or a guest or an artist-in-residence can offer everything they have while they’re on the ground, but they can always get away in a hot air balloon or a plane or a train - unless the train is on top of a building.
All this makes both of us think of MG - the Mo of Trinacria, whose work is tireless and inspiring and brings people together in ways that have sent ripples across the globe. I ask Harley if his experience at Trinacria had an impact on his decision to start an arts space in Melbourne and he says, “Absolutely. I didn’t know it at the time, but Trinacria was research and an energetic paving the way for what’s happening here. That feeling of creative community is what I’ve been seeking my whole life.”
We’re doing it! By the end of the conversation, I’m making plans to come to Australia. I want to celebrate and experience this chapter of Harley’s life in person. I want to expand on MG’s legacy of connecting artists and forging new collaborations. And I want to be with Harley again - to imagine what the next stop could be for the train on top of the building on the other side of the world.