A Cure for Happiness Open Air Festival is a safe place for everything obscure and alternative held in an abandoned quarry in the middle of a beautiful Styrian forest spanning across two days. A safe haven for all artists, who are a bit more different than your everyday art forms. The festival will showcase 10 bands across different soundscapes of heavy music and art exhibitions from uncharted territories.

Svečina, Pruh, south-east Slovenia, Styria.

The region our project is based in lacks a bit of contact with the outside world. Because the region is a bit remote from urban cities there are no real interests from outside organizers to bring concerts and events to the region. We think the people in Svečina would really enjoy something different beacause we know they are kind and generous people. It is quite sad that Svečina does not get a lot of young visitors. The reason for that is really the lack of things that would interest young people to visit this beautiful part of our country. We would like to change that with our projects and events.

Our festival will be inclusive for the artists as for the audience, who want to experience an open and safe environment free of discrimination. We are working together with artists from several European countries of different sexual orientations and gender identities, bands with a woman lead, as well as only men band members. This is to showcase that music has no borders and connects people of different nationalities and social backgrounds.
Our target group is also the local community with all its workers in tourism (tourist farms, inns, winegrowers, (fruit) farmers, …) to the inhabitants who will partake in the social activities we plan.

1. We have the venue booked for April 30th and May 1st 2021, the local authorities have been notified. The event would need to happen this year on May 1st but was postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
2. The majority of the line-up is already booked (confirmed their participation). This consists now of 7 out of 10 music artists. We are currently in talks, setting agreements, and filling the remaining 3 spots.
3. We need to get in touch with local and foreign visual and graphic artists that we selected would suit the overall festival visual to showcase their art.
4. We need to get in touch with local tourism workers and artisans to facilitate our festival with food and drink and accommodation for the participating artists.

We really hope that this project could eventually lead us to more opportunities and introduce us to more bands and people within the event organizing industry.
If this project helps us with getting Svečina and Pruh as a venue on the map of places where this kind of event can take place we would consider that as a win as well.
Success for us would be if we could realize this gathering of like-minded people.
But the biggest success for us would be if we managed to educate our visitors about other cultures, people and art forms which they have never seen before.

One of our main goals is to bring people from Svečina together. Especially all the tourist farms and culinary farms. We are aiming to gather a few of the vineyard families and work with them. We are also looking for young artists in the region that would like to present themselves at the festival to a bigger crowd.
We want our idea to be a platform for the hardworking people in our region to present their product whether it is food, vine, or any fruit product they have to offer. Some of them even have accommodation options so we would like to promote that too. We intend to leave an impression with our idea.

We feel a lot of great music and visual art is ignored and overlooked because of the media and promoters in the region which tend to play and show mainly mainstream artists. We want to give unknown artists that we feel are good an opportunity to show what they got!

Almost every small music event in this region is usually pretty narrow oriented when it comes to inviting a group of pop-cultures and LGBTQ+ communities and we want to make a stop to that by bringing them together under one roof in a region that is not used to host people from these kinds of scenes.

Promoting the region is really important to us also, so we want to give all our farmers with products and services a platform to present themselves and their products to people who might not be aware of them.

Bands - 5000€
Stage cover tent - 2000€
Accommodation - 1000€
Food/Drink - 2000€
Travel/Shuttle - 1000€
Promotion - 500€
Personel - 500€
Security - 400€
+ Reserves

We would really like to get some constructive comments and feedback which would help us improve the idea. There is always room for improvement.
We hope people will like our idea.