Headliners for this year's Avanto festival are the Ultra-red collective from Los Angeles, and American-born Terre Thaemlitz, currently residing in Japan. Ultra-red's performance Transistors (transfer / resistance) contributes in some way to the discussion awoken by the discovery that the Finnish police have been systematically drugging refugees seeking asylum before rushing them to airplanes and flying them out of Finland. Ultra-red pose the questions: "Are immigrants mere victims of war and globalization? Or are they an empire's resisting subjects?", and "What are the links between globalization, the global war economy and resulting largescale shifts in populations? What sorts of changes are being experienced in previously mono-cultural states as pressures increase from the EU and United Nations to host refugees and asylum seekers? Nations, like Finland, whose previous immigration problem was its absolutist exclusion of immigrants, are beginning to eye multi-culturalism as a prologue to population shifts. Will Finland's response to such changes follow the example of countries like Denmark and Austria?" The performance combining digital glitch music and documentary video and sound material will also feature Manuela Bojadzijev from the German anti-racist organization Kanak Attak.

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