This September, Berlin Atonal – the forward-thinking sonic and visual festival – returns to Kraftwerk Berlin for its 10th year since its relaunch back in 2013. Across ten days – six concert nights and four exhibition days – the festival brings together an eclectic mix of activations spanning music performances, art installations and exhibitions in the realm of experimental arts that challenge the very forms themselves. What is a festival in an age of attention deficit? What is an exhibition beyond the white cube? How can artistic spaces blur the barrier between the spectator and performer? These are some of the questions that curators Laurens von Oswald and Harry Glass began to question when it came to this year’s edition – the first in four years.
And not only is it the first edition in four years, it’s also the first time the world will catch a glimpse of a new collaboration between Caterina Barbieri and Space Afrika. Festival goers can also expect the premiere of a monumental site-specific performance from rapper Blackhaine, a frequent collaborator of Space Afrika. Other names include Florentina Holzinger, Rainy Miller, Laurel Halo and Sandwell District.
Hosted within the former powerplant’s industrialist terrain (that one could only find in Berlin), the festival maps out a journey through artistic projects spanning performance, music and art that lie at the very heart of experimental cultures. “Kraftwerk is a very unique space because it’s just one room divided into various levels almost like a skeletal cathedral. There’s a very specific feeling within that allows these sorts of artistic projects to grow from,” explains festival director and co-curator Laurens von Oswald.
“And although there’s a very specific and emotional mood to the space, there are no functional preconceptions,” adds co-curator Harry Glass. “It’s full of question marks – it doesn’t tell you where the stage should be or where the bar is. It leaves us with a lot of room to move freely with our ideas.”
But, despite this being the first edition since the pandemic, the ideas for this year’s edition have been percolating throughout the four years of standstill. “Obviously, we couldn’t do big events with 3,000 people in a room listening to music but we also didn’t sit around and do nothing. Instead, we did a lot of research into exhibition formats and how such formats can act as a vehicle for presenting art and music,” explains Harry.
This research manifested into an exhibition project titled Metabolic Rift which, Harry tells me, looked into the idea of “metabolising” small groups of people through spaces of art. “The challenge for us was to understand how to process people through a big, dark building through the choreography of artworks where sculptures would come alive or video pieces would appear and then disappear.” In essence, it was a rethinking of the exhibition space and how this could in turn allow artists to rethink how they can connect with their viewer.
Between the two weekends of music performances, Berlin Atonal hosts a bridging week of curatorial programming spanning from art performances to installations titled Universal Metabolism that builds upon the foundations set by Metabolic Rift. “It’s a chance for people to interact with the space and ideas that we’re exploring in the performance nights but in a different format. There’s more of a focus on the intimacy of human performance in this activation that you can’t always get from a huge musical crowd.”
The format is not dissimilar to an exhibition in that it brings together numerous artists and connects them with visitors – but the word exhibition is quite loaded. Thinking of an exhibition, one might think of clinical white walls with big lights and small information plaques. For Laurens and Harry, that’s exactly the format they want to challenge. “We’re not interested in static environmental contexts. It’s important that things appear and then disappear, that works are only available for a certain amount of time before becoming unavailable again,” says Harry. “We want to create a sort of friction in the audience’s experience that in some ways limits their freedom but also gives birth to a new freedom in thinking.”
Experimental is the word that continues to crop up when in dialogue about Berlin Atonal – but it’s one that is becoming much more contrived in its meaning. Experimental art isn’t so much a genre as it is a way of being, of creating. From a curatorial perspective, I’m curious as to how Laurens and Harry understand and perceive “experimental” art.
“The word experimental in relation to art suggests a removal from the established methods of working which in itself is a very liberating place to be. There is a mutual understanding of the risk of doing something that goes against structures and that’s a really exciting feeling,” says Laurens.
He continues, “For us, it’s always artist driven. It’s about finding an artist and trying to work their interests not only in their practice but also collaboratively. We’re obsessed with identifying artists whose practice has the potential to spill across different genres and discovering in what ways we can work with them to generate something new within the format of Atonal.” As opposed to the usual sound festival format – which capitalises on the commodification of “trendy” artists and performers –, Berlin Atonal is interested in becoming a springboard for newness.
“We always liken it to chemistry,” adds Harry. “The real analogy with chemistry is that the results of the experiments aren’t known before you put the elements together. There’s a sense of jeopardy, of risk, which powers any genuine experimental creative community.”
For more information and ticketing, visit berlin-atonal.com.