September 26–October 3, 2021
Since its beginnings as an open-air festival, UNFINISHED has grown into a 60-country-strong community around the goal of encouraging non-stop learning. 2021 marks the sixth year of the Romanian-born multidisciplinary movement and its most transformative year yet.
As an ever-evolving journey, UNFINISHED weaves between disciplines, inventing its own rules and models where existing structures fail. For its 2020 festival, UNFINISHED created its own online platform, connecting over 4000 live participants who video-met in a courtyard, danced around the same stage, and shared workshops and meals across the world.
UNFINISHED is thrilled to announce that the technology they created is becoming a permanent online world, combining new ways of gathering with previous and future content. Accessible through UNFINISHED’s signature pay-with-your-time application, it will also host #UNFINISHED21 from September 26 to October 3.
Over the last six years, UNFINISHED has hosted artists as Marina Abramović, Alfredo Jaar, and Tehching Hsieh; authors including Priya Parker and Anand Giridharadas; designers like Virgil Abloh and Susan Sellers; therapists Esther Perel and Jack Saul; journalists as NYT’s Rukmini Callimachi and Patricia Cohen; founders such as Pixar’s Alvy Ray Smith and Kickstarter’s Perry Chen, futurists from Jerry Michalski to Jason Silva, musician Nicolás Jaar, decision-makers from the WEF’s Gill Cassar to the UN’s Cristiana Pașca Palmer, curators as the Centre Pompidou’s Florian Ebner, data scientists like Chris Wiggins, photographers as Brigitte Lacombe, and many more.
To mark this moment, UNFINISHED is releasing a preview of its interactive Manifesto, distilling UNFINISHED’s values and vision into a shape-shifting intertextual wordplay:
Everything is UNFINISHED
Is there anything in this world that isn’t in motion? From cosmos to atoms, humans to opinions, we are but tiny specs on long dotted lines, infinite and incomplete, as this very list is.
Love the Process
Embrace mistakes, failures, detours, wanders, accidents, experiments. Counting them as blessings helps us take greater risks and brings our journey to more exciting places.
Subjective Everywhere
In life’s moving mosaic of bias where someone’s blindspot is somebody else’s focus, we can’t be our best without active listening, ignorance admitting, and context seeking.
Meaning is How not What
Fluid, nomadic, emerging: meaning is inseparable from the system that builds it. Focus less on the parts to better see the relations. Less flatness, more difference. Fewer nouns, more verbs.
Contrast is the Solution
Apparently, it’s natural to avoid conflict. It’s also wrong. What we need is better, smarter, kinder conflict that puts our differences to work to engineer models that suit everybody.
We are the Artist
As Joseph Beuys points out, we’re all capable of meaning, revealing, transforming. This makes anyone, anything, anywhere—everyone, everything, everywhere!—responsible for change.
Borders are Porous
Countries, humans, ideas: permeability makes endless possibilities. But the more lines and boxes we invent, the more dangerous echoes and bubbles we create.
? (Unknown)
New things can only happen if we leave them space. Uncertainty allows for unsprouted ideas, unencountered options, undiscovered paths, and others we haven’t yet met.
Make your own Metrics
Invent your own rules, your own tools, your own platforms, your own algorithms. And if you can’t, at least keep in mind that the most valuable things can never be counted.
Treasure Time
We can’t cheat it nor hardly buy it and it may well be our most universal currency. Let us honor time’s wisdom and pass down its lessons, cherish memory and celebrate age.
Play Hybrid
Multi-inter-intra-meta-multi-micro-macro-pre-post-poly-hybrid: give it a name if you must, but play with borders enough to enjoy something different while still feeling yourself.
Seed Curiosity
No matter the issue, this one philosophy cannot sour or bitter. Grow understanding but bury prejudice. Glean serendipity and harvest empathy. Learn from fear and cultivate curiosity.
Following the principles set forth by this Manifesto, UNFINISHED is excited to keep evolving into endless ventures and collaborations ranging across disciplines, from UNFINISHED Institute to Podcast, ThinkTank to Future, and interdisciplinary Labs to alternative Currencies.
