Festivals’ Path

Climate change and the sustainability crisis are also forcing international art festivals to consider how we could create ecologically and socially sustainable models to promote artists’ mobility and cultural tourism. We must also take audiences with different functional capacity into consideration in order to ensure that our festivals are genuinely accessible to a variety of audiences. The Festivals’ Path project corresponds to these needs from the perspective of international art festivals, the artists commissioned by these, and festival audiences. As recent years have seen the significant growth and evolution of the ANTI Festival, now is the time to invest in developing the tourism-related aspects of the festival. The development of cultural tourism requires additional resources, which the association currently lacks.

The project aims to curate travel connections with programming for audiences travelling to the festival by land to promote cultural tourism to Finland and the Baltic countries by land. The project will also use practical experimentations to explore how international co-productions and related tours can be realised by land, ecologically and sustainably.

The project will be used to promote the attractiveness and accessibility of the ANTI Festival from the perspective of cultural tourism. This will involve developing the festival’s online marketing to respond to the needs of audience members diverse in terms of their functional capacity well as audiences coming from outside Kuopio, Finland. The project will also involve creating a festival network that shares an interest in the questions of ecological and social sustainability, accessibility and inclusion.

Festivals’ Path will be co-curated and co-organised with International New Theater Festival Homo Novus.