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Cultivating Future Festivals as Temporary Utopias
A festival where every electron counts; a festival where physics do the job; a festival where all voices are being heard
A Future Festivals fiction
by N O R M A L S
A Future Festivals fiction
by N O R M A L S
It’s been about a year since we kicked off the Future Festivals think tank with the ambitious goal to critically reflect on our practices as festival-makers. Our cohort originally gathered to address an urgent need to rethink festival-making practices and, more broadly, our cultural infrastructures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While futures-oriented, the early months of the think tank quickly turned to the pressing issues of the present, a theme that we would constantly return to over the course of the project.
With the viral disease arguably contained or at least not taking up major news time, it was time for a roll call of the other issues marking our rolling polycrisis. Ranging from raging inflation, technocapitalist extraction on steroids, the climate catastrophe to military conflicts and unfolding genocides, we found ourselves confronted with several lifetimes full of critical work ahead. Not to say that what we do will solve any of these issues. Rather, these are the inescapable realities we find ourselves in.
Over the course of the past year, we initiated a series of experimental labs, speculative workshops, artistic interventions and performative discourses to address these grand issues and their local and situated impacts. We gathered local and international festival-makers to imagine abundant, resilient, and sustainable futures. These future visions were set to provide a rearview mirror for the group to critically reflect on the present and uncover pathways towards necessary transformations. Hopefully, the thought went, these exercises would enable us to manifest at least the tangible glimpses of these speculative futures in the present.
The realities of working in the ‘trenches’ of festival-making inhibit grand visions of future festivals marked by abundance, resilience and sustainability from ever manifesting.
While the project certainly sparked imagination, festival-makers had difficulty making the critical translation from vision to transformation. We repeatedly felt disempowered in light of the incredible challenges of the present. The realities of working in the daily ‘trenches’ of festival-making appeared to inhibit grand visions of future festivals marked by abundance, resilience and sustainability from ever manifesting. Interestingly, festival-makers who, among other things, are in the business of showing glimpses of the future to their audiences, had a difficult time applying these futuring practices to their own work. If we, as festival-makers, cannot imagine our own futures how can we continue doing so for others?
Fest-forward, here we are. Summer 2024. Intervention time. Following our programming retreat as part of Mois Multi last February, which left us all weary and uncertain about what can actually be done, it became clear that a radical intervention was necessary. We might not be able to solve the grand challenges the world is throwing at us. But what we can do, as festival-makers, is to gather folks to figure things out together. So, here it comes, the Future Festivals Summit, an urgent call upon all festival stakeholders—organizers, artists, and audiences—to get to work in shaping our collective futures.
A festival where queues are biased to increase diversity; a festival where entry fees adapt to your credit score, a festival where literally every body is welcome
A Future Festivals fiction
by N O R M A L S
A Future Festivals fiction
by N O R M A L S
Despite producing more uncertainty the Quebec City retreat successfully surfaced some valuable pieces of our festival histories. In his interview in this very dossier, MUTEK founder Alain Mongeau shared that key inspiration for starting the festival at the turn of the millennium was controversial anarchist thinker Hakim Bey’s 1991 book The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). In this anarchist classic, Bey describes TAZs as social environments that elude formal structures of control and allow different social relations to form. Anti-grand revolution, the concept arises from an appreciation of the Insurrection, uprisings that “concentrate our force on temporary ‘power surges’”. Unlike revolutions, which strive for permanence, uprisings draw their power from their temporary status and openness. As such, “it may be planned, but unless it ‘happens’ it is a failure.”
Beyond pirates, maroons, utopian communes, religious cults and the internet, Bey explicitly mentions festivals as potential zones for temporary autonomy to spark. Expanding upon literary critic Mikhail Bhaktin’s concept of the carnival, festivals present spaces for the critique of authority and reversal of power dynamics, all in search of establishing a new world. In light of the looming polycrisis and its situated effects, the TAZ presents “a perfect tactic for an era” in which authority “is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies.” It is these crack that TAZ as microcosms “of that ‘anarchist dream’ of a free culture” are set to capitalize upon.
Despite its inspiring potential, the concept of TAZ is not without controversy in both theory and practice. For one, Bey going by the real name of Peter Lamborn Wilson mobilized the concept to justify some reprehensible lifestyle choices. Similarly, anarchist enclaves that have been envisioned as TAZ, such as Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiana, are a shadow of their former selves. Telling is the story of Burning Man, a former hippie utopia once imagined as a temporary autonomous zone is now majority-owned by Google and has become a key cultural infrastructure for the big tech corporations of Silicon Valley. In other words, rather than presenting uprisings, in practice TAZs became hedonistic spaces where anything goes. A quarter-century later, revisiting TAZ through the Future Festivals project underlined its continued relevance, yet needing an urgent critique and update.
Festivals provide temporary autonomous zones for structuring social relations differently. At their best, festivals are temporary utopias.
An often underappreciated facet of temporary autonomy is the importance of utopian dreams and how these carry critical visionary value in inspiring the formation of TAZs. Put differently, it is the thought of utopia that seeds the momentary uprisings in resistance to dominant societal norms and interventive state structures. Pushing the TAZ into new, more speculative territories then, the Future Festivals Summit proposes that not only do festivals provide temporary autonomous zones for structuring social relations differently, but by doing so, festivals are spaces for the collective imagining, experiencing and making of alternative futures. In other words, at their best, festivals are temporary utopias.
“Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know”, Bey reminds us, and in order to know “the TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate.” Unlike abstract utopian dreams, then festivals as temporary utopias enable the materialization of a multiplicity of speculative futures into an experiential present. They allow us to learn to ‘know’ what we struggle for and through the prefiguration of alternative modes of existence, make for a generative critique of dominant social trajectories. Ultimately, festivals as temporary utopias present an opportunity to move beyond the utopian/dystopian binaries of mainstream discourses toward new localities.
Envisioned as a festival for festival-makers then the Summit intervenes by presenting a multiplicity of alternative festival futures prompted by the initial findings of the think tank surrounding questions of accessibility, accountability, community, resilience, and sustainability. The Summit bridges experiential interventions that inspire a shift in perception of our collective festival futures and invites distinguished speakers who are practicing these in the here and now to share their best practices for future-oriented cultural production.
Interested in joining us? → Learn more about the Future Festival Summit!
A contribution by: Maurice Jones, a curator, producer, and critical AI researcher based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canada. As a Concordia University PhD student, he investigates cross-cultural perceptions of AI, public participation in technology governance, and festivals as methodology. He’s the co-curator of the MUTEK Forum and the Future Festivals project lead.