Animation by N O R M A L S Studio

Future Festivals

Canada/Germany/Mexico | since 2023

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 Summit

Kicking-off the festivities of MUTEK’s 25th anniversary on Monday, August 19th, the Future Festivals Summit gathered more than 100 local and international festival stakeholders – organizers, artists and audiences – in Montréal, Québec to explore innovative visions for the shaping of multidisciplinary arts and music festivals. The Summit presented the culmination of a years-worth of innovation around future-proofing festival-making practices by the Future Festivals think tank.

Transforming the Society for Arts and Technology into a temporary utopia, the Future Festivals Summit charts new pathways to establishing resilient festival futures. The opening keynote invites Drew Hemment, Director of Festival Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, who proposes to think of Festivals as Labs, where extraordinary experiences can emerge to enable new ways of doing things.

Over the course of the day, host Mouna Andraos of Montréal-based studio Daily tous les jours accompanies festival stakeholders through three experiential sessions to collectively imagine technological, equitable, and sustainable festival futures. Each session is guided by the speculative work of boundary-pushing artists in conversation with the hands-on experience of festival-making experts. Calling upon all festival stakeholders, the sessions deploy innovative formats of audience interaction with the goal to bring brighter futures into the present.

Exploring our technological festival futures, the first session is guided by the performative intervention of Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary media artist and curator Nancy Lee. Staged in the speculative world of OSMOSi: 422 Unprocessable Entity, Lee in conversation with guerilla festival-maker Bani Brusadin, founder of Barcelona’s The Influencers festival, and speculative game designer Rilla Khaled of Concordia University, helps us imagine festival futures that escape current technocapitalist trajectories.

Imagining The Festival of Zero Compromise, the second session is guided by artist and activist Cassie Thornton, who is inviting us into a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. Exchanging with San Farafina, director of Club Sagacité, a creative space for underrepresented communities initiated by Moonshine, and Toronto-based Crip Rave™ collective, which prioritizes Crip, Disabled, Deaf, Mad and Sick body-minds, the session imagines festival futures, marked by increased accessibility, equity, and inclusivity.

Drawing upon his expertise in speculative world-building and his recent work Planet City, the last thematic session on sustainability is guided by designer and director Liam Young. Rooting these futures in current social trajectories, the session invites into conversation Mikellena Nettos of The Climate Reality Project, and curator of Bangalore’s Future Fantastic: AI Art Festival for Climate Change, Kamya Ramachandran to imagine more sustainable and resilient festival futures.