Armenia’s Urvakan festival finalises 2022 line-up with DJ Plead, Habibi Funk, Nkisi, more

Armenia’s Urvakan festival has finalised its 2022 line-up ahead of the event later this month.

The second edition of the festival takes place from 23rd to 25th September at the Armenian Composers’ Union Resort in Dilijan. Among the newly announced live acts at DJs set to play the festival are DJ Plead, 3Phaz, Habibi Funk, Mulatu Astatke, ZULI & Omar El-Sadek, Nkisi, Pan Daijing live a/v, Nadah El Shazly, Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, El Khat and more. 

These names join an already stacked bill featuring previously announced acts such as ABADIR, Slikback, Zoe Mc Pherson, Deena Abdelwahed, aya and Avtomat. Check out the full festival programme in the Instagram post below, and buy your tickets here. 

Focusing on countries with strong socio-cultural ties with Armenia, this year’s festival will also include a discourse program, featuring the likes of ethnographer Bulat Khalilov.  Nkisi will also take part in panel discussion about the decolonisation of music and performance. There will also be an exchange lab program, featuring architects and art historians.

The first edition of Urvakan was hosted in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, in 2019. Taking its title from the Armenian word for “ghost” or “spirit”, Urvakan relates to its organisers’ interest in revitalising Armenia’s abandoned and deserted sites and, as they put it, “their ambiguous state of being neither completely ruined, nor truly alive as they were decades ago.” Check out some photos of the site below.

As with its 2019 outing, organisers have also made an open invitation to organisations in the area to repurpose the once-abandoned spaces in Dilijan for bars, cafes, food stalls, galleries, and jam session rooms.