Accreditation
Since 2013, due to the immense interest in the festival, we have been forced to limit tickets and deny entry to ticketless guests. This sounds like a luxury problem, but it seriously threatens the future of Fusion. Reporting in the national press has led interest in Fusion to skyrocket and that has made it much more difficult to regulate the number of people at the festival. Purely informative reporting is also redundant, given that our guests can continue to find all the information they need via our usual channels, namely the website, newsletter and emails to us. Our guests also share our opinion that they have the right to party without being bothered, filmed or photographed.
For those reasons and others, we will not provide press accreditation or send out press kits.
We ask for your understanding on this and hope you can appreciate our reasons.
Reporting
2019 was a special year and we had to break new ground and found a press group.
After negotiating with the police and the authorities for months without success, our morale was at a real low. We knew that if we weren’t able to fend off the police’s attempts to increase their surveillance of the festival, it could mean the end for Fusion. We had no choice but to go on the offensive. We had to turn to the general public for help.
We know how much you and many others feared for Fusion in the weeks that followed and we were overwhelmed by the gestures of solidarity from all over Germany. The media interest also prompted a broader debate on the political issue of whether it is still possible to have free spaces in our society that are not subject to police surveillance or repressive measures.
In the end, it turned out that a cultural festival could emerge victorious in a battle for basic rights and freedoms and against the expansion of state control and surveillance. We are very grateful to you all for your support. And we are also pleased that the media interest in Fusion Festival has continued.
The press group was a loose association of media-savvy sympathisers who supported us on a voluntary basis and, despite their dissolution after the 2019 festival, continue to stand by us on relevant issues when the need arises and for whose work we are incredibly grateful.