By Signe Brink Wehl
Community, celebration, festivity, freedom, play, and rituals unfold like a carnival-like organism in Roskilde Festival’s intense temporary city, where art and activism have always played a crucial role. Since the very first festival, activist and artistic experiences have brought people together and created a foundation for dialogue and debate. Large, unique concert experiences have gathered audiences in front of the Orange Stage. Art installations have created new, innovative spaces. Performative interventions have surprised and disrupted. Crisp poetic voices have opened spaces for reflection, and activist interventions have served as calls to action in the present moment.
Participants arrive with an expectation of being surprised, and with trust and curiosity toward engaging with something new and unfamiliar. This trust and curiosity create a space of possibility for activating experimental and innovative art, but also for inspiring hope and encouraging engagement in creating change.
Over the past three years, we have worked very deliberately with utopia as a hopeful marker in our curatorial and programming approach. One that lifts our gaze toward the future and the generations to come. As insights from our collective work with Utopia have accumulated, it has become even clearer to us that utopian art can unfold through a wide range of artistic strategies. Hopeful and transformative works are not always hard-hitting or confrontational in their messaging; they can also focus on creating close, meaningful connections.
This text presents four examples of contemporary art from Roskilde Festival 2025. In different ways, these works demonstrate how hope, critique, and the courage to create change are ever-present in art, and how art can shape our ability to imagine alternative futures.
We live in a time of transition, where social inequality and the struggle for a more caring approach to our planet are ever-present. Transformative movements have brought centuries of inequality and injustice - both between people and between humans and nature - to the forefront. We speak of a more caring turn, not only between people, but also in the relationship between humans and nature.
At the same time, we live in a world where the space, voice, and potential of art are being debated and challenged. These shifts and crises demand that we make room for knowledge, set boundaries, show consideration, and create new perspectives that can stimulate a co-creative network of artists, collaborators, and volunteers. Art has a unique ability to engage us in the central issues of our time. Therefore, the utopian and hopeful curation of artworks that can communicate and sensorially translate these important themes plays a central role at the festival.
Roskilde Festival’s historical roots, as a child of the youth uprising, combined with its strategic ambition to be a sustainable community that moves people, inspires the world around it, and makes a difference, form the foundation of how we work. The programme is developed through a collective and co-creative process, where Roskilde Festival’s community of volunteers and staff together shape the framework of the experience and develop content in collaboration with a wide range of partners across artistic disciplines. Curation is part of an ongoing process of building networks, through which Roskilde Festival establishes new connections with artists, organisations, and partners who can collectively shed light on the major issues of our time.
We work from a foundation of curatorial principles and ethical frameworks, focusing on a methodological approach that translates activist, engaging, and aesthetic practices across art forms into programming and the development of artistic projects that can foster alternative and hopeful visions of the future.
Our strategic ambitions are:
- To create value that extends beyond ourselves
- To act as a catalyst for young and emerging ideas
- To strengthen the role of art within the community
Emerging artistic environments and cross-aesthetic co-creation are central to our programming and curatorial practice. In addition to our key focus areas, we have developed seven guiding curatorial principles: the regenerative; the aware and activist; the engaging; the progressive and cross-disciplinary; the surprising; the representative; and caring communities.
Together, these seven principles—alongside our strategic ambitions and utopian approach—form a framework and a shared language that is essential in a broad, co-creative process. Insights from our work with Utopia have further nuanced our curatorial methodology. If we are to engage our participants in a hopeful and more sustainable future, broad and clear messages are important, but engagement is most deeply nurtured in the intimate and relational, where people can feel that they themselves can take part in creating change.
What follows are four examples of artworks from Roskilde Festival 2025 that, in different ways, open up engaging and utopian approaches, both within the large, collective community and in the intimate and relational.
Julie Nymann’s installation at the Gloria Stage during Roskilde Festival focuses on the experience of being dyslexic. The foyer was transformed into a vivid green universe, the colour of recognition, in contrast to the red colour used in primary school dyslexia tests to mark errors. At the centre of the space stood a large red hand pressing down into the floor, symbolising the stigma many dyslexic people experience.
Nymann herself is dyslexic, and in the work she explores how categorisation can create unnecessary shame. At the same time, she points to the strengths that can emerge from navigating a text-heavy world in different ways.
The installation was accompanied by a choral performance and the sound work The Advantages of Being Dyslexic, based on statements from 80 dyslexic individuals. The work gives voice to experiences that are often overlooked and invites us to rethink how we perceive learning, language, and difference.
The Kenyan artist collective Nest Collective created the installation Return to Sender at Roskilde Festival as a sensorial critique of the fashion industry’s overproduction. The pavilion was constructed from compressed, brightly coloured bales of discarded clothing and placed right next to a large merchandise stand in the middle of the festival grounds. From the roof of the pavilion, a soundscape from a Kenyan clothing market could be heard, while a film inside the space showed scenes from the same market.
The installation places the audience directly within global circuits of consumption and waste. Clothing discarded in the West often ends up in the Global South. Nest Collective makes this connection physical and sensory, pointing to the need to return responsibility to the sender.
In addition to the installation, the collective initiated a series of activities that extended the message across the festival. Reused T-shirts printed with the message Return to Sender were produced and distributed, and festival participants were invited to take part in a sorting event, where discarded clothing was examined to explore what could be given new life.
In 2025, British artist Jesse Darling created the large-scale work The Long Way Around in the landscape at Roskilde Festival. The piece resembles an oversized wheelchair ramp leading up to a platform on top of a hill. The ramp allows wheelchair users and people with strollers to reach the top, while others must choose a longer route rather than the direct path up the hill.
The work is situated in the recreational area Milen, which functions as a camping site during Roskilde Festival. Here, the ramp operates both as a physical structure and as an artistic reflection on how different bodies move through the world, and the kinds of experiences they carry with them.
The Long Way Around is also a tribute to the communities that emerge at Roskilde Festival, and an attempt to expand them. With this work, Darling points to a simple yet powerful idea: when we create alternative routes into the community, more people can take part.
On the Roskilde Festival campsite, an unexpected parade moved through the tents: an army of love warriors in medieval costumes. Wearing chain mail, carrying crossbows, and holding giant heart-shaped balloons, the performers moved through the festival city, creating a procession that sparked laughter, curiosity, and participation.
The parade, Action Man Collecting Sweethearts, is created by artist Nikolaj Risbjerg. Here, the masculine warriors fire love letters as paper airplanes and dramatically drop to their knees in front of festivalgoers who are “hit” by a letter. Audiences gather around the procession in the hope of being struck themselves and receiving a declaration of love.
Risbjerg works with humor, care, and play as artistic strategies. At a time when the right to love for people of the same sex is once again being challenged in parts of the world, the work can also be read as a quiet yet clear critique: an insistence on spreading more love among all kinds of people.
This article is an excerpt from Utopia - a new publication from the Roskilde Festival Group that brings together three years of work on young people’s imagination, hope, and capacity to act.
The book explores how utopian impulses emerge in communities, artistic experiments, and everyday practices when young people are given space to dream, create, and act together.
Utopia is aimed at everyone working with young people, culture, democracy, sustainability, and change. And at anyone concerned with how we can strengthen our shared ability to imagine a different future.
Utopia can be purchased via the publisher Økotopia.
Photo credits:
Cover photo: Luna Stage
Göksu Kunak: Mick Friis
Our Voices Are Dreams of the Future: Frida Gregersen
No to Western Overconsumption: Rasmus Kongsgaard
The Long Way: Cathrine Catalan Flores
The Love Warriors: Isabell Zarp
