About Us

A Festival 

Every summer since 2022 AltShift brings together approximately 200 people around the topics of degrowth, eco social futures, global justice and solidarity.

The people who join are a wild bunch; from young activists and students, to more seasoned movement organizers; from eco socialist to anarchists; people involved in activism, politics, the arts-sector, education, academia or cooperatives.

And that’s the beauty of it, to connect, exchange, discuss, dance, cook, plot the revolutions yet to come, and celebrate the ongoing ones.

Programme 

In the mornings, social movement anchors speak in interactive roundtables, followed by hands on artistic/creative/ somatic workshops. 

In the afternoons, everyone is invited to host reflection spaces, discussion rounds, reading circles or workshops.

We celebrate the joy of missing out and encourage everyone to take a nap in a hammock in the woods once in a while, or go for a dip in the water. 

In the evenings, you shall be bamboozled by movie screenings, concerts, performances, drag shows and dj sessions.

Pedagogy 

In times of polycrises, mere knowledge transmission is not enough.  We need to be able to understand ourselves as actors of change. We need to engage in meaning making activities. We need to acknowledge, process and express emotions, together.

Concretely, for Alt Shift that means we engage with impulses from political collectives and movements and process them together with arts-based methodologies. That can look like creating cyanotype prints on decolonial futures, experiencing ourselves as collective body in contact dance improvisation, co-creating queer feminist podcasts or up-cycling our clothes while reading out antifascist poetry.

Shift Slow 

Shift Slow is an independent cultural association established in 2021, officially based in Vienna, Austria. We understand ourselves as part of a movement aiming for just transition to eco social futures. Our purpose is to create spaces for transformative education, using arts-based methodologies and critical contents around the topics of post-growth, decoloniality, queer feminisms, global justice, and social movement alliances.

Activities 

We organize AltShift, a degrowth festival; Germinar-t, a degrowth art residency; and participate in various art residencies ourselves, currently working on the topics of archiving working class neighbourhood memories, celebrating peasant knowledges and the right to protest across Europe.

Team 

Our association is fully volunteer based. Many of the 10 people on our team met doing the Barcelona Degrowth Masters programme. We are all based in different places in Europe and work mostly online while crystallizing into localized clusters for projects.

Alt Shift envisions eco-social transformation by addressing the root causes of environmental and social crises—power imbalances, resource exploitation, and oppressive values. We reject capitalism as a system that fuels imperialism and racism, recognizing that economic growth drives socio-ecological destruction rather than well-being.

We embrace degrowth as a political and economic project that prioritizes collective well-being, care, and justice within planetary boundaries. We stand in solidarity with liberation movements worldwide and condemn all forms of oppression, including the ongoing settler colonialism and genocide in Palestine and the war in Ukraine.

Our festival is a space to propel the just transition forward, build alliances, and foster radical change. We believe in the care revolution, centering reciprocity and mutual aid as the foundation for a just world.

Crucially, we embrace fun, conviviality, and accessibility as essential to transformation. Joy, creativity, and inclusive spaces strengthen our movements and help us build a future rooted in justice, solidarity, and collective care. 

If it's a shift we are desiring in our society, a shift away from eco-social injustices, from consumerism, from the colonial matrix of power; a shift in a direction we are shining lights on, even if we need more lights to pave the way. Then this shift must be preceded by pressing Alt.

Alt+Shift is a combination of keys that allows us to open up a window of possibilities from the few keys that we are given in our keyboard. It is opening another world that yet it's difficult to envision with solely the tools we've been given. We need new tools and a new narrative, that must be altogether altering, alternative and altruistic.

Alt-ogether, because to change something, we must start everywhere.

Alt-ering, because everything must change. 

Alt-ernative because green growth, "development" and ecomodernism are not path forwards but narratives that are advancing a capitalist and colonial agenda.

Alt-ruistic, because caring must be at the centre, and no one must be left behind. Let's explore together where alt-shift will bring us.