Grants and residencies

Arts

Drifts | Ungoverned Lives

Application summary

Drifts is a nomadic art platform that organizes festivals, symposiums, and projects in different regions in Helsinki and Seoul. It seeks to engage with critical dialogues and address urgent societal issues through audiovisual, performative, experimental, and discursive practices. The platform is developed through a collaborative approach to foster long-term sustainable relations with the diverse neighborhoods and communities that contribute to the city's plurality. By drifting between different regions, practices, and formats, we aim to raise questions such as the right to the city and right to culture, where culture happens, whose culture is valued and reproduced, and to promote awareness of the diverse urban environments and the communities that inhabit them. 'Ungoverned Lives' is Drifts' curatorial framework for 2023–2025. It proposes thinking-with strategies of resistance in the urgency of building resilient imagination with the arts. What practices and tools can foreground anti-colonial traditions of knowledge, healing, care, and collectivity amid a resurgent hegemonic wartime paradigm, national patriotism, and eco-political crises? Can art foster new imaginaries to contribute to a radical planetary repair? 'Ungoverned Lives' critically delves into diverse communities' struggles and their strategies to resist and be resilient in the face of state extractions, nationalism, and coloniality. It questions how historical and contemporary systemic oppression, racism, and social injustice continue to be the norm. It is a transhistorical and transcultural exploration of the histories from below and the memory of struggle addressed with a diverse group of local and international practitioners through moving images, sound works, audiovisual performances, lectures, and texts in two festivals and an encompassing publication.

Drifts is a nomadic art platform that organizes transcultural art festivals annually across various regions of Helsinki, Finland. It fosters cultural plurality by engaging diverse neighborhoods and communities, creating a fluid space that transcends cultural, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries. Drifts encourages dynamic social engagement and critical dialogues through performative, audiovisual, and discursive practices.

Over the past two years, Drifts has produced multidisciplinary festivals that reflect its core values, political agency, and responses to urgent contemporary issues. The festivals create temporary social spheres where participants from diverse backgrounds share knowledge and promote experimental arts. Each year’s activities are site-specific and multidisciplinary, developed in collaboration with grassroots organizations, institutions, and transnational practitioners. Drifts is committed to inclusivity, ensuring all events are free to the public.

In 2023, the festival explored Ungoverned Lives, highlighting artistic strategies of resistance in collaboration with the Museum of Technology in the Vikki region. The theme opened pathways to struggles for self-determination, liberation, and justice, emphasizing the role of art and culture in challenging the status quo. The festival featured 22 public programs with 24 participants, inviting audiences to envision a future where multiplicities coexist and to consider the possibilities of being ungoverned.

In 2024, the festival focused on Precarious Lives, examining the vulnerabilities of life amid violence and oppression. Held in Suomenlinna, a site marked by historical wounds, the festival addressed contemporary urgencies such as fascism and capitalism’s impact on dispossessed lives. It brought together 44 local and international art practitioners and presented 32 public programs, including audiovisual performances, film screenings, lectures, and exhibitions.

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