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About

Thursday 3rd– Sunday 6th September

A festival celebrating insects in art, and the art of being an insect.

Architecture, art, comedy, film, music, sound, technology and life. Pestival is a rare creature: an international, inter-disciplinary, community-led festival. Over a long weekend, Pestival celebrates how insects shape our world and how humans shape the world of insects, in both science and the arts. Eighty per cent of creatures on earth are insects, the ‘pests’ without whom humans wouldn’t survive. On 3rd September Pestival is launched at London Zoo in a symposium “How insect are we?”

Then between 4–6 September Pestival swarms on the entire Southbank Centre site and puts insects on the cultural map – before it’s too late.

BeeIntroduction

Pestival is a mobile arts festival examining insect-human interactivity in bioscience, through paradigms of contemporary art, cinema, music and comedy as well as direct scientific demonstration and educational projects.

Pestival will bring together eminent international artists and scientists and local and global communities to collaborate on cutting-edge interdisciplinary art projects, placing the natural world under the microscope in order to further public understanding of our place within the biosphere.

Vision

Pestival aims to initiate a cultural shift in the way people think, moving them towards a more integrated way of looking at the natural world. Pestival’s lasting legacy is to forge new working relationships between disciplines, communities and species.

Mission Statement

Pestival believes insects are critical to human life on Earth. With over a million insect species, they are the most diverse group of animals on Earth. And yet insects are frequently misunderstood, reviled or, at best, ignored by the majority of the human population. Pestival has set out to challenge existing stereotypes about insects and to give them their rightful place, for good and bad (vectors and pollinators), in our collective cultural consciousness.

Goals

Background

Bridget Nicholls
Founder/Director
The International Arts Pestival

I came up with the idea for Pestival back in 2004 after visiting an insect film festival called FIFI in the Pyrenees. I was very pleased when I discovered that Mark Pilkington shared my enthusiasms and together we co-produced Pestival 2006. To do this we set up The Insect Arts Club, a not-for profit organisation who aim to create inter-species events, books, media, art, symposiums for the benefit of all, and have already done so in collaboration with Serpentine Gallery, Art Angel, Resonance Fm, Animal Alchemy to name a few.

Pestival 2006, was a great success. Over 10,000 people came from all walks of life to celebrate these little guys who run the earth. Something had been born.

After the success of Pestival 2006 we had a meeting with the Southbank Centre in the spring of 2007, they were keen to bring Pestival up river. This was huge on all scales and meant a bigger team and a lot of planning. Insects had gone high profile.

Alistair Hadley and Stephanie Fudge Stephanie Fudge was just leaving the London Wetland Centre after 8 years of steering it to the success it is and became our Operations Director and the artist and maker Alistair Hadley, who curated the art for Pestival 2006 became Creative Director. Together, with the help of many, many people we became the Pestival 2009 Team.

We also gained the support of a fantastic Advisory board who have been invaluable:

The Panel includes: