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 2025, we have invited the EAT network, Talstation, Wissenschaft und Verantwortlichkeit (WuV) as well as Stromboli, 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.’
ON THE RESILIENT PRESENCE OF FIREFLIES, or: DARKNESS OFTEN YIELDS THE BRIGHTEST LIGHT –
If you walk to the edge of your city on a late summer evening, turn away from its lights and towards the bushes of the low forest, you will see the fireflies. Lucciole, Pier Paolo Pasolini would say. Temporarily flickering messengers. Intermittent threads of light, fiery white – a warning sign for the transience of conditions and structures. If you then turn back towards your city, you might ask yourself the following questions: Which lights do you actually prefer to be lured by? The big ones in the centre or the small ones on the edge? And in which of these lights do you become the subject?
About half a century ago, Pasolini lamented the disappearance of fireflies – a time when the Capitalocene slowly began to settle over the world like a final blotting paper, when the first neo-fascisms of late modernity began to form due to several political upheavals, when the perceived beginning of the end began. What did he mean by this? While he considered ecological reasons like habitat destruction or light pollution, which increasingly caused the fireflies’ invisibility, he metaphorically referred to the nascent absence of socio-political rebellion against existing power structures. According to Pasolini, the spotlights of propaganda, in whose glaring light the politically and media-dominant presented themselves, were responsible for the growing flattening of opposition to the total illumination of resistant spaces. He saw this as pandering to the cultural mainstream of his time. If the brightest spotlights of power centres glare too devastatingly, you are driven to the brink of blindness. If commodity consumption and the generic media stream prevail, it’s over for the fireflies. For all kinds of resisters. Ciao, niente, nada. Nothing works anymore.
Not true, says art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. Please look closer! Decades after Pasolini’s light-deprived resignation, fireflies have not disappeared at all. They are like inventive sparks, like dancing, erratic, intangible, and resiliently shimmering beings. Where? At the edge of the sharp light, outside the radii of the very largest spotlights. In the periphery, in the shadow, in the half-light. The crumbling of avant-garde-resistant cultural practices may apply to the obscenely over-illuminated centres, but the whereabouts of the rebellious fireflies demand a realignment of your gaze. They move quickly and constantly re-form. They only disappear if you stay in a place that is no longer suitable for perceiving them. Please look closer!, they signal to you with their luciferin, we’re still here! Not wanting to see fireflies anymore would therefore mean seeing oneself as defeated. It would mean always looking only into the dazzling spotlights and no longer recognising the delicate shimmer of possibility – no matter how much it may be merely an interstitial space, intermittent, nomadic, or extremely improbably situated. To acquire knowledge about the whereabouts of fireflies, one must see them dancing vibrantly in the midst of the night during their short lives.
The space of fireflies is, as it were, peripheral. It harbours a polyphonic present in which the past, through inventive re-imagination, points to the future. The glowing of fireflies is therefore always also a struggle for visions, for utopias. A search, a movement, a coming-into-action. Radical potential for action. A mechanism of subjectivation. For the third time, the Positive Futures Festival will now attempt to darken the overexposed present space – in the very best sense – so that you can truly feast your eyes on the fireflies: Avalanche Kaito, for example, overcome cultural and geographical hierarchies by forging a dazzlingly virtuosic alloy of disparate sounds and musical traditions. Maria W Horn and Sara Parkman move in their project Funeral Folk between the silvery spheres of Nordic folklore and experimental electronics. Blanco Teta, in turn, simply shine brightly in your face. Muovipussi occupy a courageous aesthetic position for which they need neither stage nor spotlight. Masma Dream World dreams lucidly, that’s for sure. Mandy, Indiana develops its own subversive radiance underground with headlamps. Das Kinn ignites a sound of human and urban apocalypse. At HUUUM, the fire of a vital diaspora burns.
They all operate at the breaking points of traditional archives and visionary sound concepts; they all demand a glimmer in the peripheral spaces of the social and cultural-political mainstream. Their performative research and pioneering work strike sparks in the volatile half-light of a polyphonic present where everything already seems to have been said. Thus, the bioluminescence of these and many other artists becomes a luminous Ariadne’s thread, pulling through the ten consecutive October nights of this year’s festival edition.
Renate Plieseis
The Positive Futures Festival is planned and implemented according to the criteria of Green Events Tirol basic. All events are barrier-free accessible except the concerts on Monday Oct 20th at Montagu.
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.
BE KIND. BE RESPECTFUL. BE SAFE.
The Positive Futures Festival is a shared space where we come together to celebrate music, art, and community. We are committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment for everyone. We have a zero-tolerance policy for harassment, discrimination, or violence of any kind.
REMEMBER TO:
Be Respectful. Treat everyone with kindness and honour boundaries.
Ask First. Consent is mandatory for any physical interaction.
Speak Up. If you see or experience something that makes you or someone else uncomfortable, tell us.
Cherish the Experience. Disruptive behaviour that interferes with the enjoyment or safety of others is not acceptable.
REPORTING:
Find a Staff Team member (in identifiable t-shirts) or Security.
We are here to listen without judgement.
To keep this festival safe and welcoming, anyone engaging in unacceptable behaviour may be asked to leave.