Imagining Futures: What If?

Imagining Futures: What If?
Rethinking Europe’s independent festival landscape

A new publication created by members of the Imagining Futures network, a EUNIC funded project in partnership with the Goethe-Institut London and Transform Festival, Leeds UK

A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, Imagining Futures brought together twelve innovative performing arts festivals for a pan-European experiment: a future-focused network that offered its participating festival directors and artists a deep listening space and a moment to be together, think together, and dream different futures. 

Care, well-being, and sustainability became prominent topics across the series of digital and in-person residencies. Together the participants considered how to share power, how to leave behind the inherited structures and ideologies that so many cultural institutions adhere to, above all how to rip up the rule book and work instead with radical new ideas and provocations that might transform ‘what is’ into ‘what if’.

The many provocations, inspirations, examples of existing good practice and desired ‘what ifs’ discussed by the network have been gathered into a new publication that aims to continue to inspire and inform the working practices of festivals, cultural institutes and associated organisations across Europe and beyond.

The Imagining Futures: What If? publication launched as part of Goethe-Institut’s Frequencies: Sharing Feminisms festival in Berlin on Friday 20th May 2022. Artists Angela Alves and Claire Lefèvre and festival directors Amy Letman and Anna Mülter joined host Bochra Triki to share insights into the conversations that took place across the project. Watch a recording of the event here.

Download the digital publication:

Imagining Futures Publication May 2022

Listen to the audio version HERE.