ANTI Festival for Equality, Diversity and Anti-racism
30.11.2020
ANTI festival is a discrimination-free event. We do not tolerate racism, ageism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, class discrimination or comments on people’s bodies. We want to work for equality, diversity and anti-racism.
What does this mean in practice?
We have published principles for a safer space on our website and in the ANTIZINE 2020 publication.
These are the principles guiding all our activities and all our staff must be committed to them. We encourage our audiences to follow these guidelines in our electronic communications, public speeches and other encounters.
In the future, we will also include these principles for non-discrimination in our collaboration agreements whenever ANTI Festival is the party proposing the partnership.
ANTI Festival takes diversity in its community and audiences as well as different minorities actively into account. The ANTI Festival events are free of charge to the audience, which in itself makes the activities easy to access and promotes equality.
We aim to organise our events in accessible spaces, but the artistic content of some work presented at the festival requires facilities whose accessibility cannot be ensured. Thank you for your understanding.
ANTI Festival presents artworks in public spaces, which means that anyone of us can experience art as part of their daily lives and living environments.
Participating in the festival does not require any specific language skills as the events are often multisensory and experiential. A lot of visual materials are also used in our communications, ensuring that we also get our message across to groups such as different language minorities and newly arrived immigrants.
Each year, we organise a new open call for artists, which ensures that anyone can propose their work to be included in the festival programme. For instance, the open calls are directly disseminated to organisations that represent a number of marginalised groups.
The questions of equality, diversity and anti-racism are a fixed part of the ANTI Festival curating process. In fact, we have been able to provide a platform to artists with diverse and marginalised backgrounds through our artistic activities.
We plan and seek funding for projects that put artists of diverse origins at their core and that are targeted at representatives of different minority groups. In recent years, we have carried out several local projects that have involved providing groups such as immigrant youths with opportunities for involvement.
We acknowledge that everyone in the festival staff (2 permanent employees) and board (3-7 elected representatives) is white and also privileged in many other ways. This means that we have failed to increase diversity within our organisation.
We discuss our whiteness and privileges within our organisation and in public. We actively follow the discussion on anti-racism in the art sphere and wider society and reflect on ourselves in relation to the presented issues.
Our aim is that, in the future, the ANTI Festival staff and board would include people as diverse as possible in terms of their ethnical backgrounds, age, gender and functional capacity.
Our future job applications and calls for artwork will mention our aim of becoming more diverse.
We acknowledge that our work is not done. We are constantly assessing the activities of our organisation, wish to learn more and will gladly welcome your concrete suggestions at info@antifestival.com.
We have been working on the questions of equality, diversity and anti-racism based on the Call for Action for Finnish Art Institutions list of questions, encouraged by the Art for Equ(al)ity network. We would like to thank the BIPOC and their white allies who have drawn up the list. Let’s continue this work together!