PACAK Festival Langkawi

Bringing together artists, communities, traditional culture, and contemporary practices through shared experiences, participation, and creative collaboration.

The word pacak carries echoes of the past — of things planted, fixed, or held in place — but here it shifts into something temporary, something that appears and disappears with light, sound, and time.

PACAK Festival Langkawi

PACAK Festival Langkawi is an evolving community-based cultural platform that brings together visual art, performance, artistic research, traditional culture, creative learning, and cross-cultural exchange within the unique landscape of Langkawi, Malaysia.

Initiated by Amir Zainorin through Jambatan, PACAK emerged from a simple belief: that meaningful encounters can happen when art, culture, people, and place come together. It sees culture not as something fixed or preserved, but as something living—shaped through participation, conversation, experimentation, and everyday experience.

Rather than being confined to a single venue, PACAK unfolds across different environments and communities throughout Langkawi. Activities may take place at Stateless House Langkawi, in rice fields, beaches, villages, community spaces, schools, local businesses, and public sites across the island.

By connecting artists, local communities, small businesses, cultural practitioners, researchers, and visitors, PACAK seeks to create meaningful encounters that emerge from the everyday life of the island. The platform values exchange over presentation, participation over spectatorship, and relationships over hierarchy.

PACAK supports:

• artist residencies and cultural exchange programmes
• workshops and creative learning activities
• visual and performing arts projects
• participatory performances and public events
• collaborations with musicians, performers, artisans, and local communities
• artistic and cultural research initiatives
• site-responsive and community-based projects
• storytelling, archiving, and documentation
• youth engagement and skills-sharing activities

Traditional practices and cultural forms—including kompang, rebana, angklung, storytelling, craft traditions, and regional knowledge—may be explored through collaborative and experimental approaches that encourage new forms of participation and interpretation.

PACAK seeks to create opportunities for local communities, artists, youth, researchers, and cultural practitioners to engage with broader regional and international networks while remaining rooted in the social, cultural, and environmental realities of Langkawi.

The initiative builds upon Amir Zainorin’s long-term experience developing artist-led platforms and cross-cultural exchanges, including Jambatan, the Stateless Mind Festivals, the Stateless Mind Pavilion, and the Lintas Benua Residency Programme.

PACAK is envisioned as a growing platform for artistic exchange, community participation, cultural experimentation, and creative encounters across Langkawi.

PACAK believes that culture remains alive through movement, exchange, curiosity, and shared experience.