PANEL | Closing Session — Future Festivals: Cultivating Temporary Utopias

In closing the 10th anniversary of MUTEK Forum, we invite all festival stakeholders – organizers, artists and audiences – to collectively chart trajectories for future festivals. Returning to the forward-looking interventions of the Future Festivals Summit, Cultivating Temporary Utopias presents an urgent call to action to sustain festivals and their extraordinary ability to bring speculative, alternative and fantastic futures into the present.

Reflecting on the Summit and a week’s-worth of critical conversations surrounding accessibility, resilience, and sustainability in upgrading our cultural infrastructures, the panel brings together Jessie Mill, co-artistic director of Montreal’s Festival TransAmériques, Drew Hemment of the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and Naomi Johnson from Toronto’s imagineNative. Moderated by the Future Festivals Lead Maurice Jones, audience members are invited to join the discussion in a 20-min hot seat format to critique and contribute to our collective, innovative visions for festivals to come.

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During the event, no interpreter for the Deaf will be present.

All activities held in the Salle Ludger-Duvernay will be simultaneously transcribed and translated in either French or English using an application powered by artificial intelligence. Those wishing to use this accessibility feature will find QR codes on site, which they can scan in order to connect to the live transcription. They may also click the “Transcriptions” button in the MUTEK Forum App homepage. This is a beta service, we cannot guarantee 100% accuracy.