The festival's 'Water as Nation' framing is its most explicitly political theme to date, threading together questions of civic identity, regional infrastructure, and who belongs to the ferry corridor. Installations at active terminals mean commuters encounter the work mid-journey, which organizers say is intentional. Several ferry-corridor community collectives are presenting new performance pieces developed over the past year. Critics arriving from London and New York are expected to frame their reviews through competing aesthetic frameworks, making this year's festival an unusually contested cultural event.