Future Festivals

Sufficiency Workshop @ NEW NOW Festival 2023 © Photo: Dirk Rose / Stiftung Zollverein

Future Festivals is a research project funded by the Canada Arts Council, assembling a task-force of independent festival makers from Canada, Germany, and Mexico to collaboratively imagine how their work might evolve in the years and decades ahead.

Participating festivals include MUTEK (Montreal, CA), imagineNATIVE (Toronto, CA), Mois Multi (Quebec City, CA), MUTEK Mexico (Mexico City, MX), New Forms (Vancouver, CA), NEW NOW (Essen, DE), and Send+Receive (Winnipeg, CA) who draw on distinct curatorial agendas, communities, geographies and in many cases decades of institutional memory.

Future Festivals Lab

During the project’s co-design process in spring 2023, the partners identified shared challenges surrounding questions of accessibility, resilience and sustainability.

Over the next 18 months, each participating festival will host a Future Festivals Lab that gathers the group, their extended network and selected experts in addressing these fundamental questions of festival-making.

The goal: deeply analyze shared problems and prototype solutions—from immediate, easy to implement measures to more ambitious, long-term proposals.

Future Festivals Field Guide

The on-going documentation and publication is an inherent part of the project. Editorial and curatorial platform HOLO reports from these sessions in the form of the Future Festivals Field Guide, an expanding companion dossier that follows the project from start to finish.