Festivals worldwide have been called off on account of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, but Global Eclipse: Patagonia Gathering still intends to move forward with their December 10th-16th event. Not everyone may be able to attend, though. If Argentina’s current travel ban remains in place, tourists will be unable to enter the country – and the festival’s organizers appear unwilling to issue full refunds for their tickets.
Global Eclipse has been in the works since 2017, building off the momentum of that year’s Oregon Eclipse event (pictured above). As its name suggests, the first event coincided with the first total solar eclipse in the U.S. since 1979 and billed trip-hop/bass acts like Beats Antique, Random Rab and Desert Dwellers. This year’s festival will bookend the December 14th eclipse. The organizers are alumni from Symbiosis Gathering in Northern California as well as a number of eclipse festivals in Australia.
When the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, however, the future of Global Eclipse: Patagonia Gathering started to look uncertain. In April, Argentinian authorities imposed the strictest travel ban in the Americas until September. Save for returning residents, no commercial commercial flights will be allowed to enter the country until October 25th at the earliest as the country’s case counts approach 1 million.
An attendee hopeful told The Guardian that her attempts to contact Global Eclipse for a refund were met with radio silence for several months. On August 26th, organizers announced that the event would take place as planned. In place of full refunds, they have introduced a “buyback” program in which ticket holders can recoup 50% of the cost in addition to those of parking passes and lodging in return for signing an agreement that will “release [the organizers] from liability in regards to [the] Patagonia Gathering.”
“We’ve had requests to ‘refund the money’ but it’s not possible to retrieve sunk costs for labour, and niche physical assets are not easy to sell in the downtrodden Argentine economy,” reads an email sent to ticket holders in August.
“Humans are social beings. Isolation has taken a toll on all of us. We are meant to connect and we are meant to gather. We plan to do it safely in the best way possible,” it goes on. “We are producers with decades of experience who are 2.5 years into a three-year project and we’ve learned to prepare for permutations of earth, wind, and fire but none of us had ‘global pandemic’ on our 2020 bingo card.”
Global Eclipse: Patagonia Gathering’s organizers have not responded to Selector‘s request for comment at the time of writing.
Image credit: Global Eclipse
