AltShift a degrowth festival

Alt Shift - a Degrowth Festival

The Alt Shift Festival is a degrowth festival that offers critical and creative educational content on post-growth cultures and eco-social strategies. It is a space for experimental, playful, artistic, and emotional knowledge creation and sharing on topics related to degrowth. It is also a community of care and solidarity that promotes sustainable and inclusive practices and strives to contribute to the local community and environment. We have had the privilege of hosting two wonderful and successful festivals and are riding the momentum to co-create a third!

Co-Creating & Convivial Celebrating

A unique aspect of Alt Shift is that the programme is partially co-created by all participants! Topics-wise, the workshops revolve around post-growth cultures, eco-social strategies and emotional introspection. The formats are non-formal, participatory, experimental, exploratory, playful and artistic. In the evenings we enjoy concerts, dances, theatre performances, sports tournaments and movie screenings from all the wonderful creatives at Alt Shift. For the chillier nights, we light bonfires where we share our favourite protest songs and secrets about the revolution.

Community Building

Alt Shift is also a place where community flourishes. We camp in the Austrian woods, cook and clean together, and learn from each other. All of this happens at Kunst in der Natur (Art in Nature), which provides us with ample camping and workshop spaces. The local ecosystem gifts us with wide meadows, safe havens in the woods, a river nearby to cool down and a house with a big kitchen to cook delicious vegan food together. There are designated areas to chill and be quiet, as well as a safer space for BIPOC folks. With a buddy group system, we want to make everyone feel included. The organising team is always ready to implement participant suggestions in real-time, places careful attention to social cohesion and attempts to resolve conflict quickly.

Co-Cultivating

Co-cultivation is not just a metaphorical concept within our minds and bodies, but it’s also actively happening at a very tangible and practical level at the festival. Our neighbour Tristan runs an organic community supported agriculture farm (BioSain) less than a 5-minute walk away. Participants can get first-hand experience in permaculture gardening, the bio-construction of greenhouses, or the excavation of ponds to assist in the regeneration of the local ecosystem. Also, the veggies and fruit we eat at the Alt Shift are almost all from BioSain. Talk about co-cultivation!

The next edition: Building Alliances

The third edition of Alt Shift focuses on building alliances outside the degrowth movement. Degrowth argues that we need global material energy reduction to foster just and ecological futures. Until now, the strength of degrowth lies mainly within academia and, increasingly, on a top-down policy level. Seeing the degrowth movement as a node within a wider network of alternative movement struggles, we aim to shift our focus towards creating nurturing bonds of allyship and learning how to create and cultivate such webs in a genuine way. How can degrowth become more inclusive to create research, policies and practices rooted in indigenous, decolonial, and trans-feminist knowledges and experiences? And, the other way around, how can we be better and more active allies to our sister movements?

On a very practical level, our content team aims to invite individuals and collectives fighting at the forefront of, or engaging, with grassroots social movement struggles, such as climate and global social justice, feminist abolitionism, food sovereignty, environmental justice, anti-racism, and land rights movements. Our invited guests are encouraged to bring a workshop or a discussion session, in which they share their experiences, skills or knowledge. By inviting sister movements, we aim to broaden the scope of this degrowth festival to become a space of encounters and entanglement between different social movement actors.

Nurture the Alt Shift Revolution

Your support will go directly towards the expenses involved in organising the festivity, including the venue, workshops, materials, performer fees, logistical arrangements, and solidarity tickets for folks coming from marginalised communities. Every contribution, big or small, makes a difference. Sharing our campaign helps too!

By supporting Alt Shift, you become an essential part of this movement towards inclusive, just, and regenerative modes of existence.

So, join us in realising this visionary event! Let’s create a future where our collective actions shape a world that embraces diversity, justice, and the well-being of all beings. Donate today and help us make Alt Shift a vibrant reality!

Donations from any group, organisation or individual do not equal endorsement from the Alt Shift team. Please read our positionality statement on our website for more information on our stances.