ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how music festival organisers in Britain and Denmark negotiate the pathologisation and radical uncertainty of music festivals throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Framing the strategies, forces, and imperatives which lead to shifts in how festival spaces are renegotiated in crisis as a problem of refiguration, we discuss how organisers strategise to make a physical festival space that involves a balance between governing what is now pathologised (corona) space and creatively making new spaces in the context of their individual roles and the festival ethos and vision. This chapter argues that through the wider process of responsibilisation, organisers have now become agents of governing COVID-19. They are effectively part of the distributed infrastructure of COVID-19 governance, responsible for developing strategies to monitor the virus and the (festival) population as they undertake their professional roles in relation to organising festival spaces.
