Wanting to be anywhere but here and now. The grimmer the world, the more people search for ‘something better’, something different or something new. What exists now is wrong, forbidden or impossible. And so we scatter in all directions. We flee into the past, into the familiar, into the radically different, into a future that could or should be better. We flee to other worlds, planets, fantasy, religion. Steven Spielberg is back with a new film, historical heroes are flying at you from every corner of Netflix, the climate fiction genre is on the rise, and folklore sounds like never before in the music of today. What are we looking for? And where? And above all: why?
Mystics have been trying to answer this for centuries. Often dismissed as vague, crazy or woolly, their stories seem timeless and keep resurfacing. But how do these stories find a place at our festival in 2026? Sure, we’re going deep (or high, whatever you prefer), and we will float, but we’ll do it raving, critically and completely in the here and now. Because if we’re going there anyway, we might as well make a proper party of it. So come along, sooner or later, or later now, or now later, to Explore to find and truly understand your unconscious self, your manifested self, your true nature and the completely different other.
“The world has gone completely mad.” — Lieke Marsman
