Yes, we're back, we couldn't leave you alone for such a long time in these pivotal moments. After navigating our Sliding Islands, we're inviting you for our final bow: Bastardly Yours. These two words have accompanied our emails and conversation for the past few years, as playful signatures —yet their true impact has only recently come into focus.

Bastardly Yours is also our final gesture as a team that is blessed to have been part of the wild, wondrous chapters of this undomesticated festival. We hope you felt this ride as deeply as we did.

This platform challenged and channeled us through positioning, persistence, accuracy, dominance, survival, heartbreaks, and much more. Through 5 years and 8 editions, we never settled down for a thematic approach but rather for an arsenal of emotions, always driven by the artists, our whistleblowers, who showed us the fragile equilibrium of their worlds—a sour cocktail of tensions, crises, self-doubt, statements and raw, unfiltered bastard energy.

OUR JOURNEY

Our journey started in 2020 with From Solids to Liquids, our first attempt to dialogue with the notion of "emergency" as something both marketable and intangible, while a plurality of formats shook up the predictability of the black box.

Hello from the Other Side became our way of staying connected with you, dear Bastards, during those 2021 pandemic days, through artistic video goodies and bike-delivered surprises straight to your door, complete with a wink to Adèle's heartache.

Then came a forced break up— no funding for starting 2022 (ugh). But if we had to vanish, we weren't going to disappear quietly. Instead, we invoked the post-crisis spirit of Gloria Gaynor— and pushed twice instead of once: First I was afraid, I was petrified for Spring, And so you're back for Fall. And of course, we survived.

And then came the 2023 magics, Magic Cells moving into Magic Sells: a counterforce, illuminating the invisible and untold power of new tools: spellworking, coding, hypnotizing, hacking, disrupting. These magic cells spread and multiplied, transforming into infinite particles. Some were sold out, some are still flying around.

Saying goodbye is a delicate present that comes wrapped in fear of the unknown, impatience for the new, conflicted grief, secret relief, unspeakable gratitude, future melancholia— and most of the time, all at once.

After five years, Bâtard will soon change form again with the artistic vision of a new team. Five years of tardiness, unpaid labor, nervous breakdowns, money shortages, pessoptimistic energy, fake-it-apos;til-you-make-it ethos.

Throughout this mini-herstory, we have tried to keep our promise to “re-bastardize” this established festival, to prioritize the social over the mundane, to dismantle the hipsterization of contemporary art while holding on to our love for the edgy and the unexpected. One thing we surely did is to put our full hearts in every step — even when those hearts were quite broken.

So here we are, preparing for a lasting ending, a last tribute to this shape-shifting essence and an ultimate act of marking its name in indelible ink. Friends and foes, hardcore followers, one-time lovers, from liquids to the other site, and so we are back for one last big hurrah to celebrate the end of Bâtard as we know it, what is to come, what has passed, and what will remain.

Bastardly Yours is a goodbye party, a note de bas de page of a long story, a 'thanks' section the credits, and a new era launch. This festival has been a living, breathing organism, shaped by the hands, hearts, and minds of so many—ours, yours, and theirs.

We hope that the signals, emotions, songs and ideas we've shared have left a lasting mark, thank you for being with us through this rollercoaster.

Bastardly yours,