Justyna Jochym

A Festival City Doesn’t Just Come About

Justyna Jochym, the Chief Executive of Festival City Adelaide, wasn’t always destined for the arts.

“I initially intended to work for the UN and had a passion for women’s issues and wanted to work in that space, so studied foreign languages and gender studies and geography. But the arts were always in the background, always – there was always an undertone, an undercurrent, so to speak, that kept me connected.”

It was in Krakow, Poland, where Jochym first became involved in Adelaide’s festivals and arts space.

“We were invited on a delegation here to Adelaide. And it was pretty much by day three, after experiencing the summer festival season and just the incredible arts scene that I found here that I decided it might be really cool to give South Australia a try and to take a pause from my career in Europe.”

“I did my best to tie up loose ends in my old job and just, essentially, say, you know, ‘I’ll be back soon.’ But when I did come here and got to settle a bit, I quickly decided that I want to stay here for longer than at first intended.”

It has been almost four years and Jochym remains in Adelaide.

“I run an organisation called Festival City Adelaide, which is really designed to help ensure that Adelaide is recognised as Australia’s festival capital, both nationally and internationally.”

For Jochym, Adelaide is unique as a festival city. “There’s a really special concentration of non-profit arts and cultural festivals here in the state. Some of our festivals really deliver impacts in that education space; some really do fantastic work and initiatives with environmental sustainability; others, of course, are fantastic tourism attractions but also manage to implement really robust professional development opportunities for artists and arts workers.”

Jochym is clear that “A festival city doesn’t just come about.” It requires both community and government support.

“You have to have an environment that permits festivals to thrive.” For Jochym, a festival should be “about community, communion and the communal.

So what that means is we have a community that feels a sense of communion through a communal experience, and I think those things are really integrated and connected with each other. That means a festival can really range in terms of definition and in terms of shape and in terms of structure. As long as those three Cs are achieved, to me it’s a festival.”

Recalling a festival memory that has stayed with her, Jochym remembers WOMADelaide and the year that the festival couldn’t go ahead in Botanic Park, but instead was held on a smaller scale.

“It was everyone’s first experience back to a really large music event and my family, being in New York, was still really in the thick of COVID. My dad works in a hospital as a physical therapist and was working with COVID patients at the time.”

“WOMADelaide programmed the Teskey Brothers, which is one of my dad’s favourite bands, and so what we did is we connected via Facebook Messenger so that my dad can be at the concert with us.

It was 4 am for him, it was around 8 pm for us.

I could just see him illuminated through the computer watching the concert. I could see him get really emotional and moved by the fact that there were so many people who could get together right after the most hectic and the most difficult kind of experience of the pandemic.”

And this experience, for Jochym, encompasses the power of festivals.

“With tens of thousands, essentially, of miles between us, but we could share that special experience.”

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This article is part of the Festival City Stories series, a collection of reflections about Adelaide made by the people who make this a festival place. The project was funded through the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Arts South Australia, Arts Recovery Fund, and delivered in partnership with the State Library of South Australia. 

Written by: Katerina Bryant

Photography by: Alex van de Loo