Artist Criticises Palestine Event at Roskilde Festival: Where’s the minute’s silence for the victims at the Nova Music Festival?
Opinion piece published in Berlingske. 2 July 2024. By Augusta Atla
Opinion piece published in Berlingske. 2 July 2024. By Augusta Atla
This year Roskilde Festival has organised an event titled ‘Voices of Hope and Peace for Palestine’ – an event that the artist Augusta Atla considers both one-sided and simplistic.
This year, the Roskilde Festival has decided to spotlight the Israel/Hamas war as part of their activist and artistic programme.
Originally, the event was called ‘Solidarity with Palestine’, but, following extensive criticism, they changed the title to ‘Voices of Hope and Peace for Palestine’. As the Roskilde Festival wrote in a press release on 23 May: “A little change about something as big and hope and peace.” But is this change good enough, if it is peace people are after?
No, it is a minute change that is no way big enough for the hope of peace.
The event is both one-sided and simplistic vis-à-vis an extremely complex conflict and war in the Middle East.
What do the event’s words mean in relation to a ‘free Palestine’? Do they mean coexistence with Israel within the 1967 borders? Or do they mean that Israel will have to go? The text does not make this clear.
Hamas’s original charter states that their goal is to eliminate Israel. In other words, in this context – given that it was Hamas who committed a massacre on 7 October 2023 – a ‘free Palestine’ might mean the dissolution of Israel, with Palestine occupying the entire territory where both Israel and Palestine are located today.
If Palestine is to be free and harbour hope of final peace, this requires agreeing to the 1967 borders and ceasing all war on them forever. But there is nothing about any of that in the programme for the Roskilde Festival event.
The event text also features words such as “resistance”, but does this “resistance” include Hamas’s attack on the Nova Music Festival and the raping of women?
Hamas committed a massacre at the festival. Why? Because they hate art and music, because art is democratic in its function and liberates the individual. Nor is Hamas interested in democracy or Western values such as artistic freedom or freedom of speech. Has the Roskilde Festival forgotten that? Should the Roskilde Festival not pride itself on being a platform for the free nature of art and democracy?
The Roskilde Festival has no other events to give a mouthpiece to other opinions or perspectives on the conflict. That signals a lack of diversity in the festival’s democratic scope. They could easily have created a campaign with equal voices from both sides, and mentioned both lands: Israel and Palestine. A ‘Voices of Hope and Peace for Israel and Palestine’.
However, most important of all are feminism and women’s rights. But there are no events at this year’s Roskilde Festival that condemn the rape of women at the Nova Music Festival. And don’t forget: the Roskilde Festival stemmed from a notion from Woodstock and the hippie era that women should be free and equal, and their bodies respected. Woodstock and the Roskilde Festival started at a time of upheaval, based on values and attitudes such as free abortion and being able to express one’s female sexuality without fear of being raped.
Women danced their last dance at the Nova Music Festival on 7 October 2023, before being raped and murdered by Hamas. Given that Roskilde Festival has chosen such a one-sided campaign, could they not devote a minute’s silence this year to honour the lives of them and all the other innocent young people killed at the festival?
Also to honour music as young people’s way of expressing their freedom in a democratic culture, and to distance themselves from the massacre and rape in the arena and name of art.
For an artist like myself, this is not only about a war far from Scandinavia, but also about the environment at home in terms of art and free thought. When the powerful players in the world of culture – and I think we will all admit that the Roskilde Festival is one of them – present only one side of a debate, they are creating consensus control of Danish cultural life. This reflects neither the spirit of democracy nor – what is worse – the function of art.