The three strands

Festival week - three strands

In the years ahead, Aarhus Festival explores three major questions:

How do we reconnect with nature?

How do we live with the technologies that shape us?

And how do we live side by side across borders?

Through the strands Earthbound Futures, Myth x Machine, and Borders and Neighbours, Aarhus Festival creates an open framework for art, culture, and communities that invite both reflection and action.

Audiences are not just spectators but co-creators – testing new ways of being together in a rapidly changing world.

Each strand remains in play as long as it continues to open up new artistic and social questions, making room for new ones when the moment arrives.

Earthbound Futures

Climate change is so vast it can feel distant, incomprehensible – and out of our hands.

So we begin somewhere else: by coming closer to nature before we try to save it.

In Earthbound Futures, we meet nature as an equal participant in our lives – not a backdrop, but something we are deeply connected to, dependent on, and responsible for.

Art and culture become a sensory bridge, turning ecology and climate from information into experience – something felt, not only understood.

This strand can unfold through sound, light, performance, and installation, as well as architecture, public space, food culture, and conversations where the poetic and the practical stand side by side.

We are drawn to works and formats that train attention, presence, and care – and that ask what it means to live more earthbound in a contemporary city.

Collaborations may emerge across artists, researchers, organisations, chefs, urban planners, and local communities, where nature is not a theme but a relationship.

Myth x Machine

Technology is evolving faster than we can grasp it.

What we understand today may already be outdated tomorrow.

We shape technology – and it shapes us.

In Myth x Machine, we explore the zone where the human and the technological meet.

Here, art becomes both playground and laboratory, allowing us to explore digital worlds, robotics, data, biotech, and artificial intelligence – not only as tools, but as forces that shape identity, relationships, and society.

“Myth” points to the stories we live by: hope, fear, progress, control, immortality, efficiency, authenticity.

“Machine” points to infrastructure and systems that shape us while we scroll, navigate, work, and are measured

This strand welcomes works that can seduce and disrupt at once, and that dare to ask the uncomfortable questions: Who holds power in new systems.

What happens to the body when the human and the technological merge.

And what does it mean to be human when machines can convincingly imitate humans.

Collaborations may take the form of concerts, performing arts, installations, talks, hack formats, and audience-driven experiments, where participation is not an add-on but part of the work itself.

Borders and Neighbours

We live in a time when conflict shapes both global maps and everyday life.

Wars across national borders exist alongside small but emotionally charged disputes between neighbours – over noise, hedges, behaviour, or ways of living.

The question is not only where borders are drawn – but what we do with them.

In Borders and Neighbours, we explore the border as a phenomenon that can both protect and divide, and as something we must actively engage with if we want to coexist in a diverse society.

This is about borders between nations, but also borders within the city and within the body– between generations, districts, economic divides, minority and majority, and lifestyles.

The strand invites art and culture that can create new encounters.

We are especially interested in formats that build temporary communities in public space: meals, conversations, rituals, workshops, games, walks, performances, and collective actions, where “neighbourliness” becomes something you practice – not just something you have.

Collaborations may be local or international, and they are welcome to have an edge: What does hospitality mean in practice.

When does a community become a wall.

And how can art help us rehearse sharing space, the future, and disagreement.