Decolonise Festivals: Culturescapes, Sahara 2025
For its 2025 edition, the multidisciplinary biennial arts festival Culturescapes, together with several partner festivals in Africa and Europe, curated a discussion space to rethink and reimagine power, representation, and collaboration within and between festivals on the two continents.
10 October 2025, kHaus Basel
How do we hear a broader range of voices, experiences, and practices without marginalising and/or exoticising them? What is the role of art festivals in these highly turbulent times?
As the Sahara is often overlooked or ignored in a Eurocentric perspective and is reduced to statistics, poverty, and war, whilst many historical and current connections exist, Culturescapes has decided to deepen its focus by choosing North Africa as a macro region.
The festival will start on 10 October with an opening conference on the decolonisation of festivals, a result of a joint mapping of entrenched colonial power dynamics in the art festival ecosystem and an attempt to envision spaces for fair and just representation, genuine collaboration, and inclusion.
How are the politics behind festival programming in various countries being formed and implemented?
Curated by Kateryna Botanova, the conference hosts two panels on the "Role of the festivals in times of neocolonialism and Audience engagement, local knowledge, and translation power", bringing the voices and expertise of curators, artistic directors and programmers, art historians, environmentalists, social anthropologysts and indipendent researchers.
The event ends with the dance performance “Magec/The Desert” by Radouan Mriziga, followed by the concert by Sahad.
Please note that seating is limited. Registration is reccommended.
The festival is currently working on a live-streaming service to enable a broader audience to participate. Further information will be provided soon.
Meanwhile, discover the speakers' profiles and the festival's programme.