Future Festivals
role ︎ project co-lead
role ︎ project co-lead
Future Festivals is a think tank initiated to jointly prototype new modes of cultural production. Future Festivals brings together a network of media arts and music festivals from Canada and abroad to jointly reimagine the role and responsibilities of publicly-funded festivals in post-COVID times. The network partners are New Now Festival (Essen, Germany), MUTEK (Montreal), imagineNATIVE (Toronto), Mois Multi (Quebec City), send+receive (Winnipeg), New Forms (Vancouver), and MUTEK.MX (Mexico City).
During the project’s co-design process in spring 2023, the partners identified shared challenges surrounding questions of accessibility, resilience and sustainability.
Over 18 months, each participating festival hosts 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.
The on-going documentation and publication is an inherent part of the project. We partnered with HOLO magazine, which are accompanying the project through an evolving multimedia dossier on holo.mg. View their Future Festivals Field Guide here.