Fast Forward to the Future: the Festival

April 26-27, 2019
Lunagallerian, Södertälje

Participating artists and researchers:
Estella Burga, Tova Fransson, Sepidar Hosseini, Lera Lerner, Johanna Norrbin, Anna Öman, Svetlana Polyanskaya, Ksenia Remezova, Anna Tereshkina,Timofey Tkachev.

Curators: Anna Bitkina, Ulrika Flik, Maria Veits
Coordinator: Amanda Ferrada

Fast Forward to the Future is a youth art festival coming to Södertälje on the 22nd of April, 2019 initiated by Grafikens Hus (Södertälje, Sweden) and TOK (St Petersburg, Russia).

Fast Forward to the Future is a polyphonic platform where young people come together to explore questions linked to emotional and mental perception of the future and its potentialities as well identify their role in the developing scenarios of tomorrow.  The discourse of identity is closely connected with the surrounding environment and the ways one can or cannot openly express themselves in it. Therefore, the starting point of the project are the youth own investigations of how they navigate public space, both on- and offline, researched together with five Swedish and five Russian artists and art educators.

The two-festival in Södertälje contains three themes: "Youthopia", "Recode the city" and "Youth and urban-related identity: that's what matters". It grows out of an intense week of workshops that aims to decode the host city of Södertälje by bringing young people's stories and images back into the streets. Together with the team of  Russian and Swedish artists and educators they will be utilizing activist methods through city parade, text/poetry, mental maps, news production and urban sound exploration as well as co-creating the realities of tomorrow through formulating utopian scenarios via performance and collective printing.

The festival is a part of the Fast Forward to the Future project aims to empower young people through dreaming, imagining and visualizing change. The global climate school strike, inspired by Greta Thunberg, showed the world the raw energy of youths bound together in solidarity as well as an intense frustration with the status in quo. Where does one start when a whole system needs to change? Fast Forward to the Future wants to be a platform for exploring whole new ways of thinking about what a sustainable and meaningful future can look like for the next generation in Sweden and beyond. 

The team of Fast Forward to the Future consists of curators and participating artists and art educators from Sweden and Russia, who have previous experience of working with young people focusing on cutting-edge social art practices.

Festival Schedule
Friday 26.4,  16:00 - 19:00
The opening of the festival, art exhibition, performance, drop-in print and fashion workshops, free art to bring home. 

Saturday 27.4,  12:00 - 16:00
Art exhibition, performance, poetry readings, join the city parade and drop-in workshops.

Location: Lunagallerian, Storgatan 15, 151 27 Södertälje
 

This project is supported by the Swedish Institute, Creative Force. 
Thanks to: Nova - youth culture center, Tjejhuset, Livet Bitch, Telge Fastigheter