The Durham, NC-based experimental festival Moogfest announced its initial 2018 lineup today with a list focusing on the female, nonbinary, and transgender artists that will be performing at the event. Caroline Polachek, the former Chairlift singer who now records under the name CEP, was on that list, but Pitchfork reports that she has pulled out of the festival over concerns of tokenism. “Furious to be (without approval) on an all-female & non-gender-binary announcement list for Moogfest,” she tweeted. “Gender is not a genre. I don’t need a sympathy pedestal, esp from a male curator. Take my name off this list and put me in the pit with the boys.”
2018 LINEUP ANNOUNCEMENT: Phase one of our lineup announcements is led by female, transgender, and non-binary innovators designing the future including @xychelsea, @thegavinrayna and 50 artists + beatmakers livestreaming around the world today at 12PM ET: https://t.co/iEEFSCwmlt
— Moogfest (@Moogfest) December 6, 2017
https://twitter.com/carolineplz/status/938486860447387649
https://twitter.com/carolineplz/status/938527316975800320
Moogfest have issued the follow apology:
Dear Caroline,
We apologize for reframing you in a way that takes focus off of your artistry and talent and we regret that you will no longer be taking part in Moogfest 2018.
Today’s lineup announcement was inspired by and coincided with Always On, a celebration of voices that are traditionally underrepresented. Our intention is to showcase an initial lineup that further amplifies those voices while supporting others in a way that challenges the manner in which festival lineups are typically presented.
We believe that using our platform to center women, non-binary and transgender people is an important tool to combat the erasure and invisibility that can occur when these identities are kept on the periphery. Please know that no musician was booked for Moogfest for any reason other than their own unique artistry, and today’s announcement is just phase one of our 2018 lineup. As always, the full Moogfest artist roster will be a diverse lineup of talented performers across a wide spectrum of gender, culture and politics.
Thank you for your honest expression. Thank you for your willingness to hold us to a higher standard. Thank you for starting this conversation.
PS. Moogfest is not curated by a man, it’s curated by a diverse group of people that work together as a team. There is not a single person, nor a single man that’s in charge of curating this event.
Love, Team Moogfest
This post originally appeared on Stereogum.
