[Go Green] Alt Shift / Shift Slow

The Alt Shift Festival is a degrowth festival that offers critical and creative educational content on post-growth cultures and eco-social strategies close to Vienna, Austria. It is a space for artistic, experimental and emotional knowledge creation around degrowth. At the AltShift, we don't only talk eco-social futures, we live them already. We chose our location carefully: 'Art in Nature' creates a strong interdependence with our surroundings. As we are 'off-grid' in terms of water supply, all the water used for dishes and showering goes back to the ground, meaning that we are using coffee-scrubs and ecological soap for dishes and natural shampoo in our outdoor-showers. As we are in the forest, we take extra care of the space, re-using and recycling loads of materials and taking care to leave no trash behind. We have compost toilets set up, to feed the natural cycles further. Our collaborator and friend Tristan from BioSain, a community supported agriculture farm, is a three-minute walk from the festival grounds. Almost all the vegetables we eat at the festival are freshly harvested, sometimes even by participants themselves, from the produce next door. Participants explore the CSA on a daily basis and help with projects such as eco-greenhouse building or pond excavation to create new ecotopias. At the Altshift the eco and the social are intertwined. We share care-tasks like cooking, dishwashing and space-care with everyone, so everyone gets a chance to make this place their temporary home. In this setting, the upcoming third edition of Alt Shift focuses on building alliances. By inviting sister movements, we aim to become a space of encounters and entanglement between different social movement actors. Our invited guests are encouraged to share their practices, knowledge, skills and tools or bring an artistic installation, exhibition, performance or interactive workshop.

More info: Alt Shift Festival

(General Editor: Simon Mundy)