Wacken Open Air Lets Fans Shape Festival’s Future

The team of Wacken Open Air will create a public forum at the festival’s upcoming 30th edition, Aug. 1-3, where the future of the festival will be shaped in exchange with fans.

They will meet in a dedicated area on the festival site and meet with musicians, experts, sponsors, and the Wacken team, and discuss the future of the festival, including topics like sustainability, inclusion, security, planing, digitisation and values.

A “construction table” will offer an opportunity to visualize a potential future Wacken Open Air with the help of building blocks. Workshops, new interview spaces for the press, alternative food and beverage offerings, and more will be part of the Wacken Future Factory.

The project team, consisting of Maren Maxeiner and Linda Nowak of Wacken Open Air, and Inga Wiele of gezeitenraum, is currently working on the agenda. They will also evaluate the first Future Factory in the aftermath of the festival and maintain the dialogue with everyone involved.

Maxeiner said: “We look forward to bringing all kinds of people together during the festival for an inspiring exchange. The Wacken Future Factory is our experiment in a conscious effort to generate constructive change – and we are more than just curious about the results of this interaction.”

Wacken co-founder Thomas Jensen commented: “The Wacken Open Air has always been the result of a close contact between fans, artists, and the entire Wacken family. 

“A festival will always reflect current social changes and has to face today’s challenges as well. This raises questions that we want to tackle together with our community as well as experts. The newly created Wacken Future Factory will help us to identify those questions in order to develop concrete answers.”

Co-founder Holger Hübner added: “We are very fortunate that a festival can serve as an amplifier in order to raise people’s awareness. This is a privilege that entails responsibility. 

“We are convinced that small steps can lead to important changes. Ultimately, however, we can only live up to our responsibility, if our fans want to be a part of it. For this reason, we are creating an open forum for everyone involved with the Wacken Future Factory.”