It is the cultural hub of Boom Festival. Encompassing lectures, art gallery, gardens and a forward thinking cultural program, the Liminal Village is a paradise of new knowledge within festival context.

The main means of transmitting knowledge in the Liminal Village is orality. For centuries mankind has been using oral speech to facilitate living together and keeping cultures alive. Oral African storytelling, for instance, is essentially a communal participatory experience. Everyone in most traditional African societies participates in formal and informal storytelling as interactive oral performance — such participation is an essential part of traditional African communal life, and basic training in a particular culture’s oral arts and skills is an essential part of children’s traditional indigenous education on their way to initiation into full humanness.

In contrast to written “literature,” African “orature” is orally composed and transmitted, and often created to be verbally and communally performed as an integral part of dance and music. The Oral Arts of Africa are rich and varied, developing with the beginnings of African cultures, and they remain living traditions that continue to evolve and flourish today.

Walter Ong suggests that the nature of self and community changes as a culture moves from pure orality to scribality to textuality. This change is a movement from exteriority to interiority and from communal structures to the self-reflective individual.
The way we live today in the modern world has apparently been transformed by new ways of communicating. But we at Boom’s Liminal Village present the ancestral orality for the re-emergence of communalism.

Download Boom Book – Liminal Village