Exit around the world, Novi Sad in silence: the festival as indicator

On Petrovaradin Fortress, last Wednesday around 18:00, there were seven people. Two were tourists from Hungary with backpacks and a printed guidebook in English, one was a cyclist who passed through and continued on his way, three were secondary-school pupils sharing a single pair of headphones, and one was a gardener with something resembling a rake, working the narrow paths leading to Dance Arena. Exactly a year ago, at the same place and the same time of day, it would have been impossible to find an empty staircase. The fortress was then in the final week before Exit Festival 2025. It is now in the first week after the announcement that the 2026 festival will not be held in Serbia.

The organisers’ announcement, according to a report by the N1 portal in September last year, stated that “there is no possibility” of holding the festival in Serbia the following year. The reasons given at the time were clear: after Exit’s organisers publicly supported the student protest movement (in connection with the canopy collapse in Novi Sad in November 2024), the state, as they said, “completely cut off public co-funding at all levels of government”. The telecommunications operator MTS, after 22 years of cooperation, withdrew as general sponsor. For 2026, the organisers are announcing a “global tour”, with locations in the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia.

Why a festival is more than a festival

Pivot to the sociological context. Exit in 2000 did not begin as a commercial project, but as part of the student resistance to Slobodan Milosevic’s regime. The first festival in 2000, under the “Exit” campaign, functioned as a mobilising platform in the run-up to the September elections. After 5 October, Exit transformed into a major electronic and rock music festival, but kept part of its original DNA as a place that occasionally took political stances on press freedom, civil rights, climate. After 2024, when the organisers publicly backed the students, that political dimension overran the commercial one. So, phenomenologically, a festival that brings around 270 million euros annually to Novi Sad (an estimate cited in Insajder TV analyses) loses its domestic co-funding, its sponsors and, in the end, its domestic location.

What does this mean sociologically. In post-socialist societies, cultural policy is at once a market and a loyalty discipline. A festival with 200,000 visitors over three days does not survive without a parallel relationship with local, provincial and republic-level institutions. Those institutions are not obliged to fund every cultural event they politically dislike, but they are obliged to apply the rules of funding equally. In a clientelistic system, funding for culture functions as a reward for loyalty or a punishment for disloyalty. Exit, after its statement in support of the students, indeed passed through the second regime. The City of Novi Sad, which had had constant disputes with Exit over communal costs and relations with local businesses, used the void after 2024 to stop providing support. The Province followed suit. The Republic did too. That is the classic triple filter activated the moment a subject surrenders political neutrality.

Now I must bring in a counter-argument. There is a reading, particularly present in media close to the authorities, according to which Exit “abused” the status of a commercial festival by positioning itself as a political actor, thereby itself breaking the unwritten agreement between a market event and a co-funding state. By that logic, the withdrawal of co-funding is a legitimate response to a change of the rules of the game initiated by the organiser itself. There is also the argument that Exit’s poor commercial result in 2024-2025 cannot be attributed solely to politics, but also to structural challenges on the European festival scene (Tomorrowland, Sziget and others also recorded declines). All of this is partly true. But the truth of each of these remarks does not explain the speed and synchronisation of the withdrawal of co-funding across all levels, which is political, not market-driven.

Antonio Gramsci, in the “Prison Notebooks” (Italian edition Einaudi 1948-1951, Serbian translation by Tomislav Volaric, Open Society 2008), developed the concept of “cultural hegemony” as a mechanism by which power secures consent through culture, not through force. Clientelistic cultural policy is the opposite logic: hegemony is achieved not by consent, but by withholding resources from those who do not consent. A festival that receives co-funding consents quietly. A festival that stops consenting stops receiving. Petrovaradin Fortress on Wednesday evening with seven people is a sociological monument to that process.

Here I should note something that must remain in the reader’s mind. Exit is not the only case. Two years ago a similar filter was passed, with varying degrees of intensity, by Mikser House in Belgrade, the documentary festival Free Zone, theatre projects under the roof of KC Grad. The difference between Exit and these examples lies in scale and international visibility. The larger the project, the more visible its loss (and its departure) in the international public sphere. Exit, which in 2026 is going on a “global tour”, will not collapse. It will transform into a distributed platform. What will not survive is its local function: Novi Sad without Exit is a city without its annual rhythm, without three days in which urban tourism, hospitality, catering and the cultural scene restructure around a single event.

I return to Petrovaradin Fortress. The gardener with the rake, with whom I exchanged a few words before leaving, said something that stays with me: “We used to keep the fortress up for Exit; now we don’t know whom we are keeping it up for, but we keep it up.” That is a sociological definition of public infrastructure, a space that continues to exist after the function for which it was kept has vanished. The fortress will survive Exit’s departure, as it has survived the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, two Yugoslavias. The question is not for the fortress. The question is for us, what we will do on it next July, when Dance Arena has no performers, and Novi Sad is a city that has parted with its biggest cultural brand without a single official word.

What remains, after that silence, is the question for the next round of cultural policy. How are we, after Exit, going to regulate the relationship between public co-funding and cultural autonomy? If that question is not now put, the next festival that leaves will not even receive a reportage-essay. It will leave in silence, because we will have grown used to not talking about departures.