Celestial Festival 2022

CELESTIAL FESTIVAL was produced by a core team of 4 individuals: founder and EiC of YEOJA Mag, Rae (Mee-Jin) Tilly (@raetilly), Southeast Asian non-binary filmmaker and curator, Sarnt Utamachote (ษาณฑ์ อตุมโชติ) (@sarntolstice), Brazilian DJ, producer, and cutator Folly Ghost (@follyghost), and Berlin-based educator, activist, and builder of bridges Vicky Truong (@vicky_hongli).

This 2-days festival featured a market (with food and stalls), creative workshops, film screenings, panel discussions, music performances, and a party with live music and DJs.

The goal of  CELESTIAL FESTIVAL was to pay respect to the Lunar-Solar Calendar utilised by many Asian Diasporic communities. The Lunar Calendar is a means of anchoring diasporic communities to their cultures through the moon and celestial bodies – preserving deep connections that withstand displacement and pressure to “assimilate” in Germany – a guiding tool for those disconnected.

During Asia-Pacific Heritage month’s full-moon, CELESTIAL FESTIVAL centred voices and talent from the Asian* diasporic community by providing a platform for up-and-coming talents; celebrating the Asian* diasporic community through music, sound, taste and visuals. We offered the Celestial Festival as a connecting and anchoring force in Berlin for our community, and an entry point for pan-Asian or pan-BIPOC solidarity, empowerment and commonness. Ultimately, the goal was to expand the meaning of “Asian” from just the East to also include South, Central, West Asia and even Africa – creating a representative and accurate view of Asia and the Asian diasporic community.

We would like to share a message from the CELESTIAL FESTIVAL core team:

On behalf of the CELESTIAL FESTIVAL core team, we wanted to thank everyone who came out and celebrated with us! 🥰 ⁠ ⁠

We know that it has been a hot minute since the Celestial Festival took place. We needed to decompress, process, and take some time to relax after producing such a large scale event. But we are back and wanted to share with all of you how full our hearts are from this event which would not have been possible without all of the incredible contributors and visitors who made these two days so special!⁠ ⁠

Over the next few days we will be sharing all of the event coverage taken by the incredible Tianna Strickland (@tstrickland716) (photos) and Sarnt Utamachote (@sarntolstice) (video) here on our website as well as on social media so that we can all celebrate and remember the special environment we all created together.⁠ ⁠ Celebrating and platforming the Asian* Diasporic community and experience is more important than ever and we sincerely hope to bring the Celestial Festival back next year! ⁠ ⁠

This experience has taught us so many things and we will be using our learnings to improve upon areas we still need to work on and to make sure to continue to support and highlight the aspects that we felt really worked. We are also always open to feedback from the community. If you have anything you would like to share with us, we are always just a DM or email away. (please note as a small team of volunteers, email is the best way to reach us as this is checked the most consistently: hello@yeoja-mag.com)⁠ ⁠ We want to give a special shout out to Music Board Berlin. Financial support through initiatives like Music Board Berlin’s festival funding allows projects like ours to exist.

Sincerely,

The Celestial Festival core team

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photography by: Tianna Strickland. To keep up with CELESTIAL FESTIVAL news as well as news about all upcoming and re-occurring events, click here.