The fourth edition of the Drifts Festival will take place at Levyhalli and the Nordic Culture Point in the Suomenlinna region of Helsinki from August 31 to September 8, 2024. This year's theme, Precarious Lives, focuses on the vulnerability of life in the face of violence and hatred that cross borders. The festival engages with the social scars caused by fascism and capitalism that oppress and dispossess lives and addresses contemporary urgencies in Suomenlinna, a site where wounds from various historical moments/periods remain. The festival will collaborate with 44 local and international art practitioners, presenting public programs such as audiovisual performances, film screenings, lectures, and exhibitions. It invites audiences to engage deeply with the theme of 'Precarious Lives,' fostering collective understanding, accountability, and imagination in addressing human vulnerabilities, resilience, and the process of decolonization.

Ongoing geopolitical conflicts and wars have led to genocide, loss of lives, forced evictions, erasure of habitats and socio-cultural infrastructure, ecological destruction, mass starvation, cutting off of vital resources and humanitarian aids and economic inflation, affecting countless lives worldwide. Imperial aggression and violence for territorial expansion and financial gain create ideological boundaries like nationalism and racism, leading to catastrophe, division and unbearable suffering of the innocent. Even at this moment, lives are being lost to military violence. Countless people are forced to flee their homes under forceful suppression, control and surveillance, frustrated and isolated behind border walls. Where can we live without fear of tomorrow?

Precarious Lives confronts present-day oppressive social conditions and ideologies affecting migrants, refugees, races, and genders against all forms of repression. The festival reveals enduring legacies of past injustices: the shadows of warfare, silenced memories of colonization, erasure of cultures, and uprooted and diasporic experiences. It challenges the hegemonic fascist, capitalist, and imperialist narratives that perpetuate these cycles of violence, colonization, occupation, exploitation, oppression, control, and discrimination.

The Drifts Festival will create a space that weaves together threads of memory, resistance, and struggle, fostering the reconstruction of communal spaces for healing, recovery, care, and solidarity through the arts. It aims to dismantle discriminatory barriers and promote peaceful coexistence with migrants, refugees, and numerous minorities in a transcultural society. By confronting our past and present, the festival strives to shape a future rooted in justice, human rights, self-determination, and the liberation of our bodies and lands.

Artistic Director    
Soko Hwang