Young people are more unhappy than ever. Roskilde Festival wants to inspire hope

2023 marked a year zero for Roskilde Festival. They launched the large and all-encompassing Utopia project, which aims to create hope for youth. INVI spoke to our board member Signe Lopdrup, who is also CEO of Roskilde Festival, about how art and culture can contribute to youth well-being.

Under a row of trees, a group of people aged 16-28 are gathered in an elongated ring. They are standing in the middle of a camp area at Roskilde Festival and have found shade from the morning sun.

Everything looks normal - except for one thing. The lawn is as tidy as a front garden in a detached house neighborhood. A radically different sight from just 5-6 years ago. 

Have young people become more responsible, you ask yourself. Or has the festival set a new course? The answer to the first question is anyone's guess, but if you ask Signe Lopdrup the latter, the answer is a resounding yes.

It's the year after the festival's 50th anniversary. A year zero for the festival, which with the new utopia strategy will help to make inroads into the wild problem of unhappiness among Danish young people.

Signe Lopdrup.

The tidy surroundings are not the only unusual thing. The young people in the circle are at a conversation salon organized by the Youth Bureau. They are taking part in a major study on young people's imagination. They take turns talking to one another about the questions: (i) What do you understand by the word 'utopia'? (ii) Do you find it easy to imagine a different future? (iii) What can Roskilde Festival do that everyday life can't? 

These are key questions in the survey they are taking part in, and the survey is one of countless projects that have grown out of the Utopia theme. We'll come back to how they answer the questions.

It was a UNESCO program, Futures Literacy, that convinced the orange team in Roskilde that all the chips should be spent on young people's imagination and on creating hope. The study showed that our imagination about the future has deteriorated. UNESCO's vision is to help people understand how we use the future to prepare, plan and interact with the complexity and changeability of our society.

It reasoned in Lopdrup.

"Art and culture are powerful in creating images and bringing things into play that we don't yet know. That's why we thought that it must be our role, if any, to help strengthen that imagination and create hope that there can be an alternative future to the reality we live in today," says Signe Lopdrup.

For Lopdrup, the belief in a different and better future is a prerequisite for moving forward.

One theme, many interpretations
Utopia is the framework for the entire festival - meaning that the theme was interpreted by a wide variety of people, organizations, artisans, musicians, engineers, chefs, and the list goes on.

"None of the things we work with can't be informed or inspired by this theme, and that made it really strong," says Lopdrup enthusiastically.

Among the questions they have been working on at the festival, she mentions: What kind of food will we eat in the future? How will we live and live together? How do we develop our cities sustainably? How do we end our use and throw away culture and develop new circular models?

Lopdrup also emphasizes that they have introduced new ways of going to the festival. Among other things, you can rent your camping equipment, pack it up neatly and return it. A step away from the use-it-and-throw-it-away culture that previously prevailed at the festival, where the campsite resembled the visualization of a doomsday prophecy at the end of the festival, where everything left behind ended up in the landfill.

Roskilde Festival's own transformation is in itself a picture of hope. And that's exactly the point. The festival can be both a place where you can shop and try out new things , and a place that can inspire.

The big and small u
Some initiatives are about inspiring people to imagine how they could do things differently, as the Youth Bureau study is an example of. Others are about bringing ideas to life. Examples include The Circular Lab, where young entrepreneurs were given the opportunity to develop and test green technology, Food Is Now, which explores the potential of food, communal eating and the aforementioned cleanup.

Subsequently, a concept has emerged that Roskilde Festival has internally formulated as the big U and the little u.

"After talking to participants this year, we realized that there is a huge value in the grand utopia narrative. The one about formulating and supporting a movement towards a better future. The story of hope," says Signe Lopdrup and continues:

"But it's just as important that we inspire and showcase what we call the little u, which are the small everyday actions. What gives the feeling that we are doing something very concrete and that we are moving together in small ways."

It's about inspiring and saying that your actions matter. And the feeling of moving together requires organization.

"We need to find new ways of organizing and working together across the board if we are to move in a common direction," says Signe Lopdrup.

"And Roskilde Festival only lasts eight days a year," says Lopdrup, "but you have to remember that a theme like this informs the organization and all the 30,000 volunteers who help create the festival, partners and other associations all year round. That's what gives us our strength," says Lopdrup.

Creative tools for qualitative data
The young people shadowed under the tree are now scattered all over the festival grounds. But the investigation continues. The youth agency's goal is to get close to their reality.

The conversation salon was part of an introductory workshop, but beyond that, the Youth Bureau used a special method called Cultural Probes kits to collect data.

The method is a collection of creative tools that designers and researchers use to collect qualitative data about people's lives and experiences. It was developed to inspire design ideas by engaging users in an exploratory and playful way.

The kits are often tailored to explore specific cultural and social issues by involving participants in activities that encourage reflection and self-expression - and it's fair to say that the Youth Bureau succeeded.

Among other things, the participants had to answer specific tasks and questions with a disposable analog camera. Every day they received questions via text message, which they could answer as either text, image or sound. And then they were tasked with writing a postcard to the future.

On the day the site opened, they were asked the following question via SMS: "Is there anything that exists at Roskilde Festival that you wish also existed outside Roskilde Festival?"

Here you can read a selection of the answers included in Roskilde Festival's internal analysis made in collaboration with Ungdomsbureauet:

Welcoming and openness are common to many of the responses. Some of the other responses asked for more generosity and kindness from strangers, spontaneous communities, spontaneous experiences with strangers.

Experiences that typically occur at festivals, but which we can also adapt our reality and everyday life to, which is why these realizations are valuable when dealing with unhappiness as a wild problem.

When a freight train like Roskilde Festival sets a unified direction, it creates a microcosm that can crystallize our wild problems. It allows us to break down and explore specific parts of a problem, and it can also become part of the way we tackle it. It potentially gives us a clear direction towards the goal.