Dear PFF visitors,
I would like to share some thoughts about the Positive Futures Festival with you. Behind the festival is a team of music enthusiasts who get to know fascinating, and often unknown music acts, at the most diverse festivals in many different countries throughout the year. All these discoveries are compiled for the festival programme.
The result is the PFF, a festival for Outernational Music that takes place in various locations in Innsbruck. Our programme is not about genres or superstars. We offer a stage to underrepresented artists from various musical genres, countries and cultures. We see Outernational Music as a progressive, refreshing expression of a constantly changing world and we transcend perceived, metaphorical and real boundaries.
The PFF should become an international lighthouse for adventurous and inspiring art. It is very important to us to cooperate with creative collectives from Innsbruck and to offer young talents a platform as part of the festival. For 2024, we have invited the EAT network, Inseminoid, Talstation, Openspace as well as the ZeMiT – Center for migrants in Tirol, to join us in organizing some evenings and content.
‘Empathy Over Opinion’ – our core message. We live in a time in which nationalism, scapegoating and pigeonholing are the order of the day. We realize that we cannot change the world all at once. However, if we start with ourselves and influence our environment through courage, empathy and open-mindedness towards unknown people from foreign countries and cultures, we are convinced that together we can move step by step towards a positive future.
What I would like to recommend for your visit to the Positive Futures Festival is something that has often brought me the most joy in my life: Embrace the unknown, new acts and performances, you will be surprised at what you experience.
Thank you to all the people involved in the festival, to our supporters and sponsors, to all the venues and those responsible for hosting us and to all the diverse sources of inspiration – without you, the Positive Futures Festival would not take place in this form.
I wish you a wonderful, eventful and inspiring festival. Stay open and curious.
On behalf of the entire PFF team.
Yours Martin
‘There is no teaching here, there is nothing to understand – only to feel.’
Empathy Over Opinion – Adlingayuk, emergence and the in-between – a few thoughts regarding the festival from host Martin Fritz
It’s not easy to write a text about positive futures in 2024. In view of the familiar news of the return of fascism, wars and extreme weather, I am often overcome by a longing to imitate a behaviour known as adlingayuk. This term, which comes from the Inuktitut (i.e. the languages of many inhabitants of Greenland and Canada), is used to describe a behaviour of narwhals that they exhibit in response to stress factors such as the approach of killer whales, ships or the sound of breaking ice: they fall into motionlessness and sink silently into the water. What a tantalising fantasy: to withdraw from the field of vision of others, simply to be shut out all conflicts unnoticed, gently and carefully, to simply not be there. It’s just a shame that humans don’t store oxygen in their muscle tissue like narwhals and can therefore easily stay underwater for longer. So when the constant news becomes too overwhelming, I take refuge not in the depths of the Arctic Ocean, but in remote areas of knowledge (such as Inuktitut).
During these adlingayuk-light expeditions, I came across Lokiarcheen. These creatures, which are so far away from us, live in the deep sea between Europe and Greenland in so-called black smokers, i.e. underwater thermal springs, which they use as a source of food and energy. We know almost nothing about these creatures (their existence was completely unknown until a few years ago). But apparently they live in complete darkness under enormous pressure 2,300 metres below the surface of the sea, where they metabolise the inorganic sulphur compounds of the thermal springs and thus form the basis of food cycles and ecosystems that are as far away from us as anything can be.
They can change their cell shape and have no cell nucleus, so they are neither animals, plants nor fungi, but belong to the completely different domain of archaea. And yet genetic analyses of the lociarchaea have immediately called this strict separation into question, as they also carry a large number of genes that are suspiciously similar to those of living organisms with a cell nucleus. The scientific debate is still unfinished, but it could well be that these extremely strange creatures represent an evolutionary missing link between the last common ancestors of the archea and the creatures with cell nuclei (and thus us humans). From this point of view, humans would ultimately only be a very unusual special case of the Archeans. What a difference a change of perspective can make!
And perhaps, from the right perspective, the adlingayuk of narwhals is not a diving away, but a diving towards others? After all, who knows what they do underwater, who they meet, what connections they make, track down, enter into? It is unlikely that they can dive to the depths of the Loki archipelago, but we don’t know, because we also know almost nothing about the lives of whales, these animals that are so closely related to us. Perhaps we need an adlingayuk word for precisely this change of perspective from separation and divisiveness, to being open and opening up to the initially unexpected connections in and with the unknown, the seemingly separate, in otherness. If we find it anywhere, it will be at the Positive Futures Festival 2024.
The Positive Futures Festival is planned and implemented according to the criteria of Green Events Tirol basic. All events are barrier-free accessible.
Your contribution: Environment-friendly travel for a positive future. All venues can be reached by public transport and bicycle parking spaces are available.
Discounts apply to all visitors under the age of 25 as part of our presale. Free access to all events for holders of the Culture Pass Hunger for Art and Culture. Information on this can be found at https://www.hungeraufkunstundkultur.at .
Our catering for musicians and team consists of vegetarian and vegan food, which we procure locally and regionally as much as possible. Only reusable bottles, cutlery and cups are used for catering and serving.
If you have any questions about accessibility or anything else, please contact Martin Bleicher, info@positive-futures.at or call +43-664-5298718.