Sufficiency Workshop @ NEW NOW Festival 2023 © Photo: Dirk Rose / Stiftung Zollverein
About Future Festivals
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.
Future Festivals Lab @ MUTEK Forum 2023
Following the first Future Festivals Lab at New Now Festival in June 2023, the activities at MUTEK Forum 2023 are geared towards expanding the discussions beyond the core partners to the wider cultural milieu and our global network of festival-makers and cultural professionals.
The following activities are set to provoke a rethinking of festivals, to advocate for the work of festival makers and their challenges, to rejuvenate old and form new alliances, and ultimately to take steps towards Future Festivals.
Agenda
Core Activities
KEYNOTE | Opening Talk: Festivals as Radical Rituals
10:30 am_11:00 am
Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson – Discwoman / DwellerLearn More
PANEL | Future Festivals: Forging new horizons
MUTEK Forum, Les 7 Doigts
11:00 am_12:00 pm
Naomi Johnson – imagineNative
Jasmin Grimm – New Now
David Lavoie – FTA
M: Maurice Jones – MUTEK
Learn More
NETWORKING | MUTEK Match (By invitation only)*
MUTEK Forum, Les 7 Doigts
9:00 am_11:00 am
ROUNDTABLE | (Jointly) Expanding orbits of future festivals
MUTEK Forum, Les 7 Doigts
1:15 pm_2:45 pm
Cam Scott – send+receive
Damian Romero – MUTEK.MX
Kris Voveris – New Forms
Marie Pier Gauthier – Office national du film du Canada (ONF)
Kaitlyn Davies – Refraction
M: Greg J. Smith – HOLO
Learn More
WORKSHOP | Towards Future Festivals (By invitation only)*
Goethe-Institut Montréal
2:00 pm_5:00 pm
Associated Activities
KEYNOTE: Digital Art as a Business: XR in Focus
MUTEK Forum, Les 7 Doigts
10:30 am_11:00 am
Anne Desponds – THE CATALYSTS
Learn More
PRESENTATIONS | XR landscapes
MUTEK Forum, Les 7 Doigts
11:00 am_12:00 pm
Winslow Porter – Forager | New Reality Company
Chris Salter – Zurich University of the Arts
Learn More
KEYNOTE | Finding our climate muse: A greener industry for electronic music
MUTEK Forum, Les 7 Doigts
11:00 am_12:00 pm
Eli Goldstein – Soulclap, DJs for Climate Action
Brighid Fry – Housewife | Music Declares Emergency Canada | Earth Percent
Learn More
* Contact
If you are interested in participating in these sessions or in the Future Festivals project, please reach out to futurefestivals@mutek.org
Maurice Jones, Project Lead, Future Festivals - mjones@mutek.org
Sarah Mackenzie, Creative Director, MUTEK Forum - smackenzie@mutek.org
Sarah-Ève Tousignant, Funding and Strategic Projects Manager - setousignant@mutek.org
MUTEK acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
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