History of Nomadic Festival

History of Nomadic Festival

The Nomadic Festival began in 1995, hatched in the minds of the residents of New York City's Lower East Side community of squatters. Arrow, an anarchist squatter, began by writing a letter explaining his plans for the summer. His message in a bottle was a call to find if anyone was out there. The message was well recieved . Before they knew it, Arrow and his friends were sifting through a pile of letters.
After a couple of months of cutting and pasting, mailing and telephoning, writing and plotting and planning, they set out on a journey which flowed into a summer of wacked out adventures, strange gatherings, festivals of the bizarre, and radical parades through the streets of the unsuspecting, otherwise zombified, gameboard of McAmerikkkulture.
reprint from the Nomadic Festival infozine

The original tour was put together in the summer of 1995 by Arrow and his friends. The original Nomadic Festival tour is chronicled in the 120 page book Carnival of Chaos: On the Road with the Nomadic Festival (Available from Bloodlink Press, P.O. Box 7414, Philadelphia, PA 19101).
Learning from first tour's sucesses and failures, a group of people who had participated the year before attempted to do it again in the summer of 1996. This time, a school bus was purchased, and with several other vehicles, the group raged across the country, encountering many highs and lows, going from Austin TX, to Portsmouth NH, to Missourri, to Minneapolis, ending at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada (with about 20 other stops in between). Travelling with the Texas band, Coprolingus, the tour provided some strange happenings across the country.

nomadic@musespace.com