The end of the world as we know it – 2020

Under the title “The end of the world as you know it” the new and special online edition of The Overkill festival, is focusing on exploring hopeful futures.

The theme of the festival is directly related to the environmental, economical and identity crisis we are living in; our ongoing quest to “save” the world, the apocalyptic perception of the future, the movement of social collapse, an urgent need to reinvent ways of being together, a necessity to deal with our emotions toward nature and non human entities and so on. The pressure is physical now.

More and more communities and minorities feel unrepresented by the media, the governments and the culture they live in. When online platforms offer to regroup, to socialize and organise yourself, does it give these groups tools to express their ideas and opinions? We are wondering how these communities are/could transform these online social tools for their own reappropriation.

We see that collaborative platforms, open source projects can be a support for communities to experiment new ways of living together in a catastrophic environmental and economical context. When video games, often challenging you to save the world, are use as alternative space to resist oppressive governments, when films are re telling the stories we thought set in stones, to open our minds, when artists are engaged and push us to take action, we need to look into these scenarios to  re-imagine our future. We believe it is time to imagine a world in which humans are not the center of everything, but part of a circle of natural and artificial beings that try to live in a balanced environment.

We believe that playfulness, interactive and participatory art and fiction are necessary tools to explore these alternatives for our (present) future. Not only the content of this media can help us, but also the creative gameplay, the collaborative modes, immersive experience as triggers for the imagination, filters as tools for empathy, personification in films as attempts of different communication…

In these times when corona virus is spreading worldwide It is even more urgent to work on these alternatives in as many creative ways as possible. The momentum of solidarity, but also the need of togetherness and care for each other, we are living now in such a crisis must continue to become change. The fear and the unknown are something we live with, let’s surpass this to become builders of our world.