At Roskilde Festival, you can help create a shared festival saga, dance wool into art, sing for peace and explore works that open new perspectives on community, responsibility and the future.
This year’s Art & Activism programme presents a range of artworks, performances and workshops where young artists and communities invite you into playful, hopeful and thought-provoking spaces. Here, the future is not only about bleak forecasts and difficult crises, but also about singing, dancing, creating, listening, playing and imagining something different together.
You can contribute to a collective festival story, felt a huge wool artwork with your feet, create accessories from waste, sing in a choir for peace, experience a musical role-playing drama about the power of the market and let plants carry difficult feelings and sounds.
Scroll down and explore the programme.
In Esben Holk’s participatory AI artwork Slop Plot, Roskilde Festival is transformed into a shared digital saga. Through a specially developed web app, you can upload a memory from the festival and become part of a collective collage work and an eight-chapter adventure.
In Gloria’s foyer, you can follow the story on a large screen, where the work constantly changes. Out in the camping areas, the performers known as the scrapers wander around, inviting festivalgoers to contribute.
Inspired by medieval troubadours, internet culture and brainrot aesthetics, Slop Plot asks who actually writes our shared story in a time of AI-generated content and fragmented realities.
Slop Plot can be experienced in Gloria’s foyer from 1 July to 4 July.
What do folk dance and felt have in common? Both are created through repeated movements, shared rhythms and old techniques.
At Dancefloor, Hedestrik x Nordisk Dans invite you into the work Uldværk: et arbejde i alle tider, where you and other festivalgoers create three large felted tapestries for the festival site. First, the wool is prepared. Later, Nordisk Dans strikes up the music for folk dancing while the wool is felted under your feet.
You do not need any experience with dance, wool or craft. It is about taking part in a process where old techniques become a living gathering point in the middle of the festival.
The finished works will later be hung on the facade of Food Court.
Sunday 28 June at 13:00 and 15:00 at Dancefloor.
How can something broken, forgotten or left behind become something beautiful and powerful?
That is the question you can work with when the Congolese art collective Ndaku Ya La Vie Est Belle invite you to the workshop From Trash to Art. Here, you can create your own accessories from materials and waste collected at the festival.
The collective comes from Kinshasa, where a lack of waste management, toxic pollution and pressure on water resources shape everyday life. In their hands, can lids, cigarette butts, scrap parts, dolls and electronic waste are transformed into wearable sculptures.
From Trash to Art. Monday 29 June at 12:30 and Tuesday 30 June at 12:30, The Yard
At a time when war and conflict take up so much space, ActionAid Denmark invites you to use your voice as a form of soft resistance.
During First Days, you can take part in choir rehearsals at Dancefloor with Luna Ersahin, Danish-Kurdish musician and lead singer of AySay. Here, festivalgoers rehearse songs for peace together and warm up for a large singalong concert at Fauna during Final Days.
At the concert, Luna Ersahin, Annisette from The Savage Rose and young voices calling for peace and reconciliation will come together. Host Moussa Mchangama will guide the audience through songs from different parts of the world.
Choir rehearsal. Sunday and Monday at 11:00, Dancefloor
Singalong for peace. Thursday at 11:15, Fauna
By Badesøen, three large goat horns rise from the ground with ribbons tied around them. Here, you can step into Noah Holtegaard’s artwork Jeg ønskede aldrig at såre nogen, which explores how blame is placed and sometimes shifted onto others.
The work draws on stories of goats as bearers of human sin. In Noah Holtegaard’s version, the horns become a place where you can pause and think about who is made into a scapegoat, and why.
During First Days, there will be performances around the work in collaboration with the Center for Kunst og Mental Sundhed.
Jeg ønskede aldrig at såre nogen can be experienced by Badesøen.
Platform is transformed into a living marketplace when Spellchestra take over the 360-degree open stage with Marketplace, a musical role-playing drama about economics, power and community.
Seven performers from the experimental music scene appear as a noisy troupe of bards challenging Terminus, the god of private property. Their weapons are song, play, laughter and games.
In the chaos of the marketplace, the community is put to the test. Let yourself be drawn into an unpredictable musical drama that asks whether we can play our way free from the iron grip of the market.
Marketplace: Friday 3 July at 11:45 and Saturday 4 July at 14:45 at Platform.
At Platform, you can experience the world premiere of Enter the Flesh, a sci-fi performance by choreographer and dancer Dorotea Saykaly and director Emil Dam Seidel.
Here, you are invited to rediscover the body as something that remembers and reacts. In a time when everything is moving faster, the work opens the body as a space for presence, sensing and empathy.
Dancers move as bodily catalysts in a staged laboratory investigation, where the boundary between human and machine begins to dissolve.
Enter the Flesh. Wednesday 1 July at 17:00 and Thursday 2 July at 17:15, Platform
In Grow, our festival garden, you can experience Forskudte sandheder, an interactive sound installation by composer and sound artist Ulrik Vincent.
The work explores the light and dark sides of the mind through auditory hallucinations, inner voices and overthinking as shared sensory experiences. Sounds move in and around green plants, while voices and audio fragments are activated through movement and presence.
As an audience member, you can contribute your own confessions, stories and truths, which are recorded through the plants and become part of the sound work.
Forskudte sandheder. Sunday 28 June at 13:30, Grow
