Serbia's Exit festival will go ahead this summer
Exit festival has been given the green light by the Serbian Prime Minister for 2020, although it will be held in a limited capacity.
Unlike the many European countries that have cancelled music festivals this year, Ana Brnabic asked the organisers of the festival, held in Novi Sad, to postpone its 20th anniversary edition to August this year.
“We recommend to move the festival to August because we expect that the situation (with pandemic) in the whole of Europe will be totally under control by then,” she said.
Exit founder Dušan Kovačević said: “[The] festival in its full format with 55.000 [attendees] per day and 40 stages will probably not return until 2021, but we are delighted to hear that health situation is becoming increasingly better and that we’ll be able to mark 20th anniversary of EXIT this summer with meaningful and safe event.”
“[The] health and safety of the audience and everyone involved at the festival is our top priority. We will work closely with Health officials in order to take all precautionary measures and make festival in August as safe as possible. Between fear and optimism we always choose [the] latter and we’re thrilled that we will have opportunity to be together with our fans and favourite artists this summer,” Kovačević added.
UPDATE (14/7/20): EXIT will no longer go ahead in 2020, but is being postponed until 2021.
A press release from the festival reads: “Earlier this spring, the Serbian Prime Minister had asked EXIT not to cancel the festival but rather postpone it to mid-August. At that time, the number of new daily cases was on a steady sharp decline and even our most cautious health experts believed that zero number of cases would be reached in June, almost two months before the new festival date in August. During this time, the whole of Serbia was also fully reopened, with no restrictions in an open-air public gathering and all borders were open.
“Unfortunately, during the past few weeks, there has been the development of the epidemic with an increase of new daily cases in several municipalities in Serbia that were put under strict restrictions.
“The EXIT team has followed the current situation of the epidemic closely, always keeping in mind the safety and health of all visitors, artists and team members. That is why it was decided first to drastically reduce the festival capacity in order to make sure that everything would be as safe as possible. However, since the health situation has not improved yet after the second spike in cases, organisers have made the decision that the 20 year celebration of EXIT Festival will not take place from 13 to 16 August this year at Petrovaradin Fortress.”
