Cooler Lumpur Festival 2020 cancelled due to pandemic

The Cooler Lumpur Festival 2020, planned for Nov 6-8, has been cancelled. Photo: Cooler Lumpur Festival

This year’s Cooler Lumpur Festival, scheduled for Nov 6-8, has been cancelled amid the rise of Covid-19 cases in the country.

In a recent Facebook post, the festival’s organisers said that after exploring all options, they had to face the reality that it would not be viable to run the festival this year.

“With the uncertainty around Covid-19 and taking into account our internal resources, we wanted to be able to make better use of our time and effort towards exploring other avenues and planning for 2021," says festival executive producer Ayesha Rahman.

Cooler Lumpur Festival 2020's shelved programme included a mix of on-site events and online content.

“As easy as it may seem to bring it fully online, a digital event does have its limitations as the human interaction can only go so far," she adds.

Cooler Lumpur Festival 2020 would have marked the festival’s eighth instalment since its inception in 2013.

This annual multidisciplinary festival of ideas normally features workshops, readings, art exhibitions with local and international writers, artists, activists and intellectuals and a host of discussion panels.

Ayesha promises that the festival will be back in 2021.

“We will continue to work towards bringing you the unique events that you - our festival attendees - have grown to learn and love, and strive towards accomplishing our purpose... to share and spread new ideas, to ruminate and rediscover old ones and to serve as a facilitator to our cultural conversation,” she concludes.