Future Festivals Field Guide: Survey: Future Makers Need Community, Too
Survey: The Future Festivals Summit brought together cultural innovators. Why do we need a festival for festival makers?
On Aug 19, 2024, the Future Festivals Summit gathered nearly 100 cultural professionals from over a dozen countries in Montréal to discuss safeguarding cultural spaces in times of eroding public support and widening political divisions. Here’s what some of them said about the importance of community.
“Festivals, like most cultural organizations, are very small. We are nodes on an informal and unorganized network. Most of the time these characteristics are what enable more diverse and emergent ideas. But it can also be very isolating. It is obvious to say that bringing people together to discuss (and think through the future of their domain) still has immense value. It is good for people to be in meatspace together to think about the future of meatspace.”
Ryan Stec is an artist, designer, educator and producer working with texts, organizations and things, and is currently the Co-Director of the art and technology center, Artengine and an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Ottawa.
“As a cultural producer from Colombia, it was invaluable to hear how festivals in other parts of the world are made and what their respective histories, needs, and intentions are. The summit reaffirmed my belief that through our work, we can contribute to bringing about the transformational change the planet and future generations need.”
Diana Yanive Torres is the Director of Fundación Cultural Arca in Bogotá, Colombia. With the ARTKA platform, Torres is committed to boosting Colombia’s digital art and electronic music scene.
“The summit created a space for much-needed exchange in which curators and cultural workers from our diverse yet context-specific field could share experiments and learn from one another about how to deal with challenges. It helped move everyone’s practice forward.”
Florian Weigl works as curator at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology presenting, producing, archiving, and publishing research at the interface of art, technology and society.
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Alexander Scholz
Alexander Scholz (he/him) is a Berlin-based writer, curator, and publisher. He’s the founder and co-editor of HOLO, an independent media imprint that explores critical creative practice where art, science, technology, and culture intersect. Scholz works regularly with international festivals and cultural organisations and has, for example, developed exhibitions, conferences, and educational formats for A.C.C. (Gwangju, KR), Mapping (Geneva, CH), MUTEK (Montréal, CA), and NODE Forum for Digital Art (Frankfurt, DE).
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