Into The Great Wide Open 2025

Into The Great Wide Open 2025 is behind us. For fifteen editions, the festival on Vlieland has showcased how art, music, nature, and people come together and how that sparks change. This jubilee year revolved around hope and movement, with RESIST and the Building Site of the Future as powerful steps towards a different way of seeing, creating, and living.

RESIST YOURSELF

"Resistance begins by saying no"

Resistance was the guiding principle at Into The Great Wide Open 2025. That was embodied by Lieke Marsman, who addressed the packed Nicolaaskerk: "Resistance begins by saying no.” In Bruintje, the village's brown café, Maartje Wortel and Joost Oomen, among others, joined in to talk about listening and entering into conversation. And that resistance belongs to all ages was proven by the kids who marched in a protest through the grounds.

There was also resistance in the music. The Mary Wallopers closed the main stage on Friday with Irish folk punk with a message after they were silenced elsewhere a week earlier over their pro-Palestinian statement. Openly delighted with their arrival was returning crowd favorite Antony Szmierek, who after his show himself went off in the crowd to the Irish band. Sef went straight to everyone's heart. Jerry Afriyie joined that set, in an invitation to all those open hearts. The core: Netherlands, do better. A small variation and at the same time a call to action from his foundation Nederland Wordt Beter, which is shutting down after 15 years now that it has achieved its goals. An invitation to everyone: take up the baton. The post-punk of shame also offered every opportunity to head for the barricades, as did the rumba-inspired punk of the Congolese Kin’Gongolo Kiniata and the rousing hip-hop of Deki Alem.

ART

Art that flows and reflects

With the theme Currents, the art program came to life. Sander Hagelaar presented his work Lucien, in which light and water come together in motion within an seemingly endless network of pipes. Gemma Luz Bosch brought calmness to the hustle and bustle with the work long low slow baths, where visitors gently swayed up and down like ebb and flow. Not far away, artist duo Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy brought you back down to earth with the visually stunning and socially critical work It's All Right, where visitors, lying in a beach chair, gradually drifted towards discomfort, with a view of a churning sun that looked more and more dystopian by the minute.

A selection from the Palestinian artist Maisara Baroud's series I'm Still Alive was on display, with which he has been letting friends, family - and now thousands of strangers - know on social media since October 7, 2023, that he is still alive through a drawing. The ever-growing collection of over 700 drawings illustrates displacement, fear, and hope. That is also resistance.

ART PROGRAM 2025

SUSTAINABILITY

Building towards the Future

At Into The Great Wide Open, the future was literally built together with the festival and construction sector. At various locations on Vlieland, this year the Building Site of the Future arose. A testing ground for emission-free, circular, and biobased construction, where the festival experimented with sustainable innovations in collaboration with partners such as BAM, TBI, and Stichting Doen, including bamboo as a building material, or the use of geotextile as an alternative to hundreds of meters of plastic ground cover.

Additionally, traveling fossil-free became the norm. Because nearly half of the festival's emissions come from traveling to the event, the festival fully committed this year to sustainable alternatives: from train and festival bus to electric taxi and car sharing. With the Good Travel program and the new FIP designation (Fossil-free Important Person), fossil-free travelers were rewarded. Through the mandatory Good Travel surcharge, all visitors also contributed to a Transition Fund that compensates residual emissions and invests in emission-free energy and transport.