Can a festival provoke for all the best reasons?

At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, nothing seems to be off the table – from a meditation on genocide to the morality of procreation.
Festival of Dangerous Ideas return to Carriageworks. Photo: Courtesy of FODI. A chaotic stage with a person wearing an earth globe on its head and the signs ‘it doesn’t have to be THE END’.

Many of our Australian festivals today can be ridden with bureaucracy, where bold ideas have to battle it out with funding incentives, venue restraints or personal interests.

But what if being disruptive is embedded in the very DNA of a festival?

With a clear agenda to challenge and provoke, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) is set out to be exactly that. This year it presents a roster of “hard topics”, ranging from political censorship during a global conflict to the moral responsibility to not have children.

Unlock Padlock Icon

Unlock this content?

Access this content and more

Celina Lei is an arts writer and editor at ArtsHub. She acquired her M.A in Art, Law and Business in New York with a B.A. in Art History and Philosophy from the University of Melbourne. She has previously worked across global art hubs in Beijing, Hong Kong and New York in both the commercial art sector and art criticism. She took part in drafting NAVA’s revised Code of Practice - Art Fairs and was the project manager of ArtsHub’s diverse writers initiative, Amplify Collective. Celina is based in Naarm/Melbourne and was most recently engaged in consultation for the Emerging Writers’ Festival and ArtsGen. Instagram @lleizy_