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About

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 brings together eminent international artists and scientists, along with 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. Pestival says “Insectes sans frontières”.

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

Our Story


Bridget Nicholls
Founder/Director

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 the first Pestival in 2006. To do this the Pestival Team grew and set up The Insect Arts Club, a not-for-profit organisation with an aim to create inter-species events, books, media, art and symposiums for the benefit of all, and we soon collaborated with other organisations such as the Serpentine Gallery, Art Angel and Resonance FM, to name a few.

Pestival 2006, held at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes, south London, 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 hatched.

Alistair Hadley and Stephanie Fudge

As Mark went back to his first love (with the door open) to develop further his highly succesful Strange Attractor Press, our team expanded to include Stephanie Fudge, Operations Director, who had previously spent 8 years at the London Wetland Centre steering it from start-up to the success it is now. Artist and maker Alistair Hadley joined us as Creative Director, following his inspired co-art curation (with Alfred Camp) for Pestival 2006. Together, with the help of many, many people we became the Pestival 2009 Team.

Pestival 2009 at the Southbank Centre was a tremendous success, seeing a 20-fold increase in visitors to 200,000. It featured 50 free interactive events and numerous experts at the cutting edge of art and science, and was supported by over 260 volunteers. Over 10 million people worldwide were reached by Pestival’s press campaign. Media coverage included all broadsheet newspapers, high art and serious science journals, music and culture magazines, Time Out, ITV News and BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme. In addition there was international press coverage including The New York Times and Nippon TV. BBC London Weather even broadcast their TV report live from inside the Termite Pavilion. Of the 10% of visitors surveyed, 98% had changed their view of insects and their importance to the health of the planet and our daily lives. Insects had gone high profile!

Following our recent successes, we have had numerous requests to develop Pestival in a myriad of directions. We have now been asked to take Pestival to New York, San Francisco, Kyoto and Berlin.

Our plans for the future are already underway, with another Pestival scheduled for May 2012 in London. The next Pestival is set to be totally different again, as we take up a 3 year residency at London Zoo.

(Above: Pestival 2009 wraps up at 2am – the last Pestival team standing!)
© Joseph Burns

Support

Over the years, we have gained the support of a fantastic Advisory Board who have been invaluable:

The Panel includes:

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 the first Pestival in 2006. To do this the Pestival Team grew and set up The Insect Arts Club, a not-for-profit organisation with an aim to create inter-species events, books, media, art and symposiums for the benefit of all, and we soon collaborated with other organisations such as the Serpentine Gallery, Art Angel and Resonance FM,  to name a few.