While working on a project at Point Nepean on the Mornington Peninsula, Aphids' artistic director Willoh Weiland kept passing the Dromana Drive-In. It fascinated her and some other members of Aphids, an arts collective that has been going, with ever-changing membership, for more than 20 years.

Among the aims of Aphids areto give  performances, work with new technologies, and to explore alternative models of community and engagement. Somehow, the drive-in offered potential. "It's this spooky and spectacular location just next to the freeway," Weiland says.

They paid a visit when the management was replacing 35-millimetre projectors with digital technology, and the old machines were laid out on the ground like carcasses. "We went a couple of times and it was such a wonderful, social way of seeing cinema," Weiland says. "It was just as much about all the teenagers making out in their cars, as well as the popcorn, as it was about watching a film. In this setting, it becomes a lot more of a conversational experience about what you are looking at."

Working with various parts of the surrounding local community – from the Dromana senior citizens marching girls, to an amateur theatre society and a primary school that was making a film about the drive-in – Aphids made the film Finale, a simple narrative about one man's quest for fame.

They showed it as part of The Drive-In Project, the locals swamped the place and now they are bringing the drive-in experience to Federation Square, as part of a week-long festival celebrating Aphids' work over two decades.

"The drive-in is such a social space for cinema to be enjoyed, and I think there is something particularly Australian about that," Weiland says.

Part of the project was connecting city and outer suburban-regional audiences, so several Melbourne artists were commissioned to make short works to screen at Dromana. These will be shown during the Fed Square celebration and the square will become a drive-in (with only one car, alas, but many deckchairs) for the screening of Finale.

To get the mood right, the car won't be any old model – it is a mint condition 1976 Ford Escort, just to get the 1970s feel of a drive-in, when that form of entertainment was at its peak. Other films being shown include the 1988 cult classic Young Einstein by Yahoo Serious, and video shorts by Aphids artists including Bindi Cole and Emile Zile.

Weiland started as an alumni of a residency/mentoring scheme with Aphids when she was working on a Next Wave festival project. This collaborative emphasis will also be part of the creative workshops and film-making that will be going on at Fed Square during the Aphids week, when anyone from the community can go into the studio they will occupy on the square and join in the art-making.

Aphids was Federation Square's first company in residence in 2006 but some of its recent projects have included Flyway, the premiere of Game Show at the inaugural Festival of Live Art, and Forever Now, in which hundreds of artists from around the world made work inspired by the Golden Record sent into space on the Voyager Space probe in 1977.

Weiland says the thing that has remained a constant during Aphids' 20 years has been the commitment to working across different art forms, mentoring and inhabiting interesting sites – which have included a hairdressing salon and a Japanese samurai hotel.

To make Finale in Dromana, much of the community was involved, basing the narrative on a story told by a member of the theatre society who used musicals, as a child, to communicate intense emotions. The story follows this main character from his home to the drive-in, seeing various groups along the way. When he arrives, he gets the chance to perform in his own musical – magically, on the big screen.

Weiland says one of the  most wonderful things about working with different communities is their different approaches to the arts and how they are created. "We've been trying to make the conversation about contemporary art more broad and have more people's opinions about it," she says.

The Drive-In Project begins at Federation Square, Melbourne on November 10 with screenings beginning at 7.30pm on Friday, November 14. www.fedsquare.com