https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1783-0388
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ABSTRACT
To consider the festival’s potential as an activist tactic may seem naïve and disconnected from the colonising practices of event tourism. However, today’s curated immersive experiences are indebted to a wider festival imagination: a spatial imagination suffused with reversal and transgression. In this paper, we trace a transgressive festival imagination through four vectors of reversal that have contributed to how we imagine both festivals and activism: the crowd, play, appropriation and spontaneity. Each point to the significance of festival space as mutable, protean, volatile and transitional. Together, they extend a techne of activist tactics, and contribute to the somatic language of the creative industries’ experience economy. By tracing the transgressive festival imagination in this way, we reveal how the contemporary urban festival and the performative tactics of social movements share visions of contingency, playful performance and an aesthetic-political heightened energy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. That ‘cool’ sells everything from Hollywood films to New Labour is not McGuigan’s point, instead it is capitalism’s appetite of endless appropriation, incorporation and colonisation. For Belgrad (Citation1998) spontaneity continues to embody a cultural stance of refusal, commodified or not, it is read as a symbol of defiance, unpredictability, uncontrollability and disruption. Non-conformity sells and we readily find readings of spontaneity that situate it within a consumerist paradigm. Packaged and sold to youth cultures seeking unmediated authentic cultural experiences Hamilton and Denniss (Citation2005) spontaneity offers the promise of ‘performative resistance’ (Raymen, Citation2019) and a more authentic, improvisational and creative self.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kirstie Jamieson
Kirstie Jamieson co-leads an MFA in Design for Heritage and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University. Her research explores festival space, cultural planning, urban heritage and minority cultures. Kirstie is currently leading a Deaf Heritage project that brings together critical design and critical heritage to imagine BSL in public life. She is most interested in the critical potential of festivals to serve as platforms for excluded communities.
Louise Todd
Louise Todd is programme leader of the MSc International Festival and Event Management at Edinburgh Napier University. Her research interests lie in arts and cultural tourism, and festivals. She is concerned with stakeholder engagement, visual culture, visual research methods, art, and design in these settings. Louise’s background is in visual art and she continues to practise art. She is currently researching the visual culture of Edinburgh as a festival city and is interested in the critical potential of festivals to engage with different groups of stakeholders in the city.