About This Reader
This Reader was developed within the EUFEAST project as a conceptual resource for festival professionals. It examines festival management through a care-oriented and existential perspective and develops a mental map through which purpose, relationships, organisational conditions, power, participation and sustainability can be considered as parts of one interconnected field.
The Reader therefore begins with the question of meaning: why do we make festivals? It then asks what kind of relational ecosystem is required if a festival is to realise its artistic, cultural and public purpose. Care enters not as an additional topic or a request for greater kindness, but as the practice through which a festival takes responsibility for the relationships, power and conditions that make its purpose possible.
The Perspective of This Reader
This Reader approaches festival management through the combined perspective of cultural management and existential counselling. It has been developed by a practitioner whose professional work has taken place in both fields: through more than twenty-five years of cultural and festival management, and through the practice of existential and meaning-oriented counselling.
This combination is not incidental. Festival management is usually approached through planning, finance, production, marketing, governance, audience development and organisational efficiency. These fields remain necessary. Festivals must secure resources, coordinate complex processes, meet legal responsibilities and produce work within limited time and capacity. Yet festivals are not mechanical systems, and the people involved are not functions within a production process. Festivals are created through human beings who perceive, interpret, choose, relate, carry costs, exercise power, search for meaning and respond to uncertain conditions.
Existential counselling begins from these dimensions of human life. It asks what it means to live and act under conditions that cannot be fully controlled; how people respond to uncertainty, paradox, limits and responsibility; how freedom operates within given conditions; how meaning is perceived and realised; and how distinct human beings create connection without losing themselves. These are not only therapeutic concerns. They are also central questions of cultural and organisational life.
Drawing on existential philosophy, this Reader uses the perspective of existential counselling as a lens through which the human realities of management can become more visible. The aim is to humanise festival management: to complement conventional business and administrative approaches with an understanding of the persons, relationships, meanings and living conditions through which cultural work becomes possible.
EXISTENTIAL PERSPECTIVE
This reader brings an existential understanding of human life into the relational and organisational conditions through which festivals are made.
Care belongs to both fields. In counselling, care concerns how a person is perceived, encountered and supported without replacing their freedom, judgement or responsibility. In cultural management, care concerns how relationships and organisational conditions are created, protected and repaired so that people can participate, contribute and develop without being reduced to instruments or depleted by the work they sustain.
In both contexts, care is more than kindness. It requires perception, judgement, boundaries, responsibility and the meaningful use of power. It asks what a particular person and situation require, what can and cannot be changed, whose agency must be protected or developed and what consequences different choices will create.
CARE CONNECTS THE FIELDS
Care connects the two fields: it concerns how human beings are perceived and encountered, and how the relational and organisational conditions of their participation are created, protected and repaired.
The Reader therefore moves repeatedly between personal experience, relationships, festival organisations, stakeholder ecosystems, communities, public institutions and wider social and ecological life. It begins with the human person not because care remains an individual matter, but because organisations and societies practise care only through people, relationships, decisions and structures. Personal attitude is the starting point; organisational and public conditions determine whether care becomes reliable, just and sustainable across time.
This combined perspective also explains the form of the book. Existential thought resists the assumption that one predetermined answer can fit different persons and conditions. Instead, the Reader develops a way of perceiving and judging: a care-oriented mental map through which festival professionals can examine purpose, relationships, uncertainty, cost, expectations, power, participation and sustainability in their own contexts.
One Orientation, Many Scales
The system described in this Reader is complex. Festivals involve many people, relationships, roles, structures, stakeholders, communities and living systems. Communication, cost, expectations, power, participation, care and sustainability continually affect one another. Readers may therefore reasonably ask: How can I attend to all of this at once?
This Reader is intended primarily to help festival professionals develop a care-oriented way of seeing and a corresponding attitude towards their work. The emphasis is on understanding recurring principles rather than memorising a large number of separate techniques. Practical tools can support action; judgement is needed to recognise what care requires in each particular relationship, conflict or organisational condition.
The perspective developed here is less complicated than the range of its applications may initially suggest. The same basic principles recur at different scales: recognising the human being rather than reducing a person to a function; remaining curious about realities beyond one’s own mental map; making relationships, conditions and power visible; asking who carries cost and who receives return; connecting responsibility with sufficient influence and support; respecting agency, distinctness and legitimate limits; and taking responsibility for repair when harm occurs.
A COMMON ORIENTATION
Care offers a common orientation across different scales · the situations change, but the basic principles of seeing people, relationships, cost, return, power, responsibility, capacity and possibility remain.
Care concerns human beings and begins in the way a person perceives, values and responds to another person. It becomes concrete in everyday encounters: how we listen, communicate, make decisions, recognise contribution, distribute cost and return, respect boundaries, use power and respond when a relationship is damaged.
For this reason, the Reader introduces relational principles first at the personal level. It uses situations that many people may recognise from family life, friendship, work and ordinary human relationships. These examples make the underlying dynamics visible before they are applied to festival practice. The aim is not to reduce organisations to personal relationships, but to understand the human processes from which organisational life is made.
Personal practice is necessary, but it is not sufficient. A festival cannot depend upon the goodwill, conscience or relational capacity of particular individuals alone. Caring judgement must also be translated into decisions, responsibilities, policies, procedures, budgets, working conditions, communication practices and organisational memory. This allows care to become more durable and less dependent upon who happens to occupy a role at a particular moment.
The movement is not only from the personal to the organisational. Organisational conditions also shape personal behaviour. A person may value care yet work within structures that reward urgency, conceal cost, separate responsibility from authority or make attentive communication impossible. Conversely, well-designed structures can protect time for reflection, make contributions visible, support just decisions and help people act in accordance with values they might otherwise struggle to sustain. Personal practice and organisational form must therefore continually inform and correct one another.
From there, the field of attention expands. The festival relates to artists, employees, volunteers, audiences, funders, public authorities, partners and other stakeholders through particular people. These relationships form networks; repeated participation can develop belonging, community, shared responsibility and collective memory. Across time, the relational ecosystem created by a festival can contribute to wider cultural, social and ecological conditions.
THE EXPANDING SCALE OF APPLICATION
Person → Relationship → Organisation → Stakeholder relationships → Network → Community → Society and living systems
This sequence is not a rigid ladder. Every scale remains present within the others. Societal conditions shape organisations; organisational structures shape relationships; relationships shape people; and people can transform the conditions in which they participate. The sequence is a learning path: it allows readers to begin with recognisable human experience and gradually perceive the wider ecosystem created through many interconnected relationships.
The same principles do not change when the scale expands. What changes is the number of relationships and consequences that must be considered. In a conversation, care may require listening, clarifying meaning and recognising the other person’s limits. In an organisation, the same orientation may shape a policy, budget, decision-making process or distribution of responsibility. Across stakeholder relationships, it may determine who can participate, whose knowledge is recognised and who can influence what is created. At community or societal level, it may guide how the festival contributes to shared capacity, cultural life and the living systems upon which continuation depends.
No reader is expected to apply every principle simultaneously. The first task is to notice differently. A change in perception can alter the questions a person asks; different questions can lead to different decisions; repeated decisions can become practices; practices can become organisational structures; and structures can gradually influence the wider ecosystem. The Reader therefore offers a lens rather than a complete set of instructions. One relationship, decision, procedure or recurring practice can be examined at a time. Care develops through repeated attention, judgement, action and repair—not through the immediate mastery of a complete system.
FROM READING TO PRACTICE
Way of seeing→ Attitude→ Practice
How the Argument Develops
The chapters form a cumulative movement rather than a collection of separate subjects. Each chapter changes the reader’s way of seeing and creates the question that the following chapter must answer. The movement begins with purpose, expands towards the festival ecosystem, establishes an existential account of human life and action, examines how relationships are made, defines care as a relational and organisational practice, and then follows its implications through community, power, democracy and sustainability. The conclusion returns to meaning and asks what possibility a festival can responsibly help bring into reality.
THE MOVEMENT OF THE READER
Meaning and Purpose → Relational Ecosystem → Human Existence → Human Nature → Relationships → Care → Community → Domains of Care → Power → Democracy → Sustainability → Meaning
This is not only a linear progression. The argument is also circular. Meaning gives festival practice its direction. Care shapes the relationships through which that purpose is pursued. Power shapes the conditions under which people can participate, decide and act. Democracy concerns how that power and responsibility are shared. Sustainability asks what can continue across time without depletion. Meaning must then judge whether what continues still deserves to be sustained.
THE CIRCULAR ARGUMENT
Meaning gives direction → Care shapes relationships → Power shapes conditions → Democracy shares responsibility → Sustainability carries what matters across time → Meaning judges what should continue
Chapter 1 — Why Do We Make Festivals?
The first chapter asks why festivals are made. It moves attention from producing an event towards creating meaning and distinguishes purpose from content, activity and performance indicators. Once purpose becomes the horizon against which festival practice is judged, the next question is what kind of ecosystem can bring that purpose into reality.
Chapter 2 — The Festival as a Relational Ecosystem
The second chapter asks how a festival participates in cultural development through the ecosystem it creates. It moves the reader from seeing the festival as an event towards recognising a relational ecosystem that can inherit, interpret, practise and help transform culture. Because this ecosystem can either develop or deplete people, relationships, places and living systems, its cultural influence becomes a field of responsibility and leads to the question of how human beings act within it.
Chapter 3 — Acting in an Unfinished World
The third chapter explains why the Reader turns to existential philosophy and psychology in order to understand the conditions under which human beings must judge, decide and act. Festival professionals work without complete knowledge, guaranteed outcomes or unlimited capacity. Uncertainty, paradoxes and dilemmas, and limits and limitations therefore shift attention from technical control towards responsible human judgement and raise the question of what kind of being can respond meaningfully within these conditions.
Chapter 4 — Life as Dialogue
The fourth chapter asks what kind of being can respond to an unfinished world. Erich Fromm’s account of distinctness and connection, Max Scheler’s distinction between reality and possibility and Viktor E. Frankl’s theory of meaning show how people can perceive possibilities and participate in what life becomes. This shifts the argument from human conditions towards human response and prepares the move into the particular relationships through which that response takes concrete form.
Chapter 5 — How Relationships Are Made
The fifth chapter translates the existential foundation into a relational grammar: relationship equals communication, cost exchange and expectations across time. Beginning with a relationship between two parties, it makes visible how perception, value, capacity, trust, dependency, boundaries and conflict develop through ordinary interactions and become embedded in organisational conditions. Once these dynamics can be recognised, care must be defined as the orientation through which they are judged and shaped.
Chapter 6 — Care as a Way of Relating and Organising
The sixth chapter defines care not simply as kindness, comfort or rescue, but as the relational and organisational practice through which the conditions of wellbeing are created, protected and repaired. This moves care from personal intention into repeated decisions and organisational structures. It then becomes necessary to ask how caring relationships grow beyond particular parties into belonging and community.
Chapter 7 — When Does a Relational Ecosystem Become a Community?
The seventh chapter expands from particular relationships towards belonging and community. Belonging provides a legitimate place without requiring the loss of distinctness; community additionally requires shared practice, continuity, collective memory and shared responsibility. People must be able to determine their own meaningful responses and coordinate distinct contributions without a central authority assigning their roles or requiring sameness. This collective scale makes a synthesising framework of care necessary.
Chapter 8 — The Domains of Care
The eighth chapter gathers the preceding principles into the relational, organisational, supportive, spatial and cultural domains of care. It shows where the same caring orientation becomes concrete
and how judgement must consider agency, cost, return, capacity and consequence across domains.
Each domain also raises the unavoidable question of power: who can define, decide, refuse and influence what follows?
Chapter 9 — Power Is Already in the Relationship
The ninth chapter makes visible the power already shaping communication, cost exchange and expectations. It distinguishes power from official authority and follows the movement from the caring use of power towards enabling power, empowerment and a just and meaningful distribution of power. Once power is understood as relational capacity rather than domination alone, the argument must consider how agency, participation and responsibility can become part of democratic culture.
Chapter 10 — Care, Participation and Democracy
The tenth chapter shows that recognition, judgement, boundaries, negotiation, dissent, responsibility and repair are also capacities of democratic life. It examines how authoritarian power may become meaningful through experiences of injustice, exclusion or powerlessness, and connects caring leadership with organised social agency as another possibility. Festivals, local authorities and communities can practise these capacities together, which raises the question of whether their effects can continue without depletion.
Chapter 11 — Sustainability Without Depletion
The eleventh chapter adds repetition and time to wellbeing. It asks whether meaningful activity can continue without depleting the people, relationships, communities, places and living systems upon which it depends, and extends the relational framework towards ecological responsibility. Sustainability cannot decide what deserves to continue; the argument must therefore return to meaning.
Conclusion — Meaning: Bringing Possibility into Reality
The conclusion returns to Scheler’s distinction between reality and possibility and asks what a festival, within its particular power and limits, can responsibly help bring into reality. Care provides conditions for distinct contributions to meet, while meaning judges what deserves to be sustained, repaired, transformed or ended. Wider transformation, when possible, emerges through many proportionate contributions rather than heroic claims by a single festival.
Scope and Purpose of the Reader
This Reader is not a comprehensive festival-management manual, a clinical or therapeutic guide, or a checklist that can determine the correct response to every situation. It does not replace the technical and professional knowledge required to plan, finance, govern, communicate, produce and evaluate a festival.
Its purpose is to provide an existential and care-oriented foundation through which those activities can be understood and judged. It invites festival professionals to consider not only whether something can be delivered, but what purpose it serves; what relationships and conditions make it possible; who participates in deciding it; who carries its costs and consequences; whose capacity develops or becomes depleted; and what kind of cultural, social and ecological world the practice helps create.
The Reader asks that this knowledge be placed within a wider responsibility towards cultural purpose, human dignity, relational wellbeing and living systems.
This Reader is a synthesis. It brings together the author’s education and training, professional practice in cultural management and existential counselling, personal experience and a particular understanding of human life and society, and places them in dialogue with established ideas from philosophy and psychology. It is therefore not an academic monograph, a systematic review of research or a claim to present a definitive theory of care, and the connections and conclusions developed here are inevitably shaped by a particular mental map.
The Reader therefore does not ask to be accepted as a statement of absolute reality. Its interpretations should remain open to evidence, dialogue, disagreement and correction. They are offered as a basis for reflection: a perspective through which festival professionals can examine their own experience, test the proposed principles against different realities and develop responses appropriate to their particular relationships and conditions.
PURPOSE OF THE READER
This reader seeks to humanise festival management by placing professional practice in the service of cultural purpose, human dignity, relational wellbeing and living systems.