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Berlin Atonal has made its return to the Kraftwerk complex, a former power plant turned cultural haven, including the venues of Tresor, Globus, and OHM. This latest full edition of the festival, its first since 2019, unfolded over two immersive weeks, inviting attendees to delve deep into a world where sound, light, visual art, and performance merged in the cavernous, brutalist walls of the building. Here, the festival explored the multifaceted concept of metabolism, spanning ecological, biological, economic, and political dimensions. "Universal Metabolism," the festival's featured exhibition, offered a shifting perspective, building upon the previous year's "Metabolic Rift," traversing the intricate intersection of sound and visual art across the multiple levels of the power plant.
One distinguishing feature of Atonal Festival is its year-round employment of a visual arts curator since 2017. The collaboration with visual artist Adriano Rosselli in the team of von Oswald and co-director Harry Glass has yielded rather unique exhibition concepts integrated into the festival's fabric throughout time. This commitment stems from Atonal’s origins in the early '80s, when Dimitri Hegemann established the festival as a platform for sound and visual art. Revived in 2013 under the stewardship of Laurens von Oswald at Kraftwerk Mitte, the festival continues along this trajectory. This year's exhibition, spanning briefly between the two weekends of the festival, invited viewers to witness a choreographed dance of ever-evolving environments, adapting with each passing night. Rosselli's curatorial approach was processual, creating an "exhibition organism" that mutated in real-time, although some might argue it felt a tad more orchestrated than the livelier, ever-changing flow of the previous edition. Compared to its predecessor, "Universal Metabolism" seemed less thorough and articulated, yet it still provided a unique perspective on the choreography of artistic events and the use of sound in exhibitions.
Among the compelling works that greeted visitors in the hall of the ground floor, Livia Melzi's tapestries immediately caught the eye. Her reinterpretation of 16th-century colonialist engravings, juxtaposing indigenous people as both savage warriors and bearers of European traits, delved into the complexities of colonization, self-perception, and the interplay of history and art. The haunting violence depicted was thoughtfully balanced by Bridget Polk's nearby performance, "Reclaimed Damages", where rubble was artfully stacked, creating ephemeral equilibriums that collapsed and reconfigured, responding to the building's conditions and the vibrational impact of sound.
A comparable delicacy emanated from Mire Lee's installation, "Black Sun." Her clay-soaked textiles, slowly worn out by a machine-pumped rivulet of water from above, symbolized the passage of time and the fragility of our attempts to evade decay through technological dreams.
On the way back to the next floor, Valerie Export's work added to such feelings of human fragility and volatility, with menacing organ tubes hanging as if poised to crash down like atomic bombs.
Further on, Richard Sides took visitors into an expansive exploration of the human project in "Shoplifting in the Anthropocene." His installation on the basement level of Kraftwerk formed a web of interconnected environments, challenging our notions of progress through collages, sculptures, and thematic rooms. The pieces were all connected like a diagram or pathway made of waste, printed material, all ironically interlinked to question the idea of progress in humankind.
This exhibition area was accompanied by Ain Bailey’s 3-audio channels installation “Trioesque,” a unique auditory experience that wove spatial sounds from the three cavities of the Deutzer Bridge. Bailey's creation transported the visitors in a blend of on-site bridge sounds and the artist's composition in Berlin.
On the fourth floor, Fritz Kahn's 1920s and ‘30s graphics, depicting metabolic processes in the human body, served as both works of art and scientific education. These surreal illustrations cast light on humanity's tendency to personify biological processes but also delineated a moment in history when technology and militarization began reshaping our understanding of ourselves and progress.
Hidden Resonance X Kraftwerk, a sound installation brought to life by Rabon Aibo, could easily evade the notice of the casual festivalgoer climbing the stairs to level +8. Nevertheless, for the discerning observer who approached with patience and a dash of serendipity, it unfolded as an unexpected work of sound art. Aibo's transformation of industrial gas cylinders into peculiar sound-producing contraptions, animated by kinetic motors, created an intriguing dialogue with the bygone acoustics of the power plant building's original piping infrastructure.
The result was a sonic reverberation that resounded back not only the post-industrial nature of the building but also the acts that inhabited it, especially to the lyrical singing of Laxlan Petras and Yasmin Saleh’s "Humanities." The duet performance invoked the traditions of opera while melding them with a free-spirited and spontaneous choreographic interplay. Their stage presence formed a living tableau of the artists themselves, while Petras' drawings, thoughtfully positioned in the performative space and container, shadowed themes of decay and transformation, intertwining with the intimate and personal nature of the performance in a suspended reflection.
The exhibition’s flow turned more pronouncedly to the performative side with the German premiere of "The Third Reich," by renowned theatre director Romeo Castellucci. The video work, expertly complemented by Scott Gibbons' hammering sound, opened with a performative act that ignited a symbolic linguistic ceremony within the expansive narrative canvas. In a display that balanced minimalism with powerful impact, the work cast words as spells, delivered too swiftly for comprehensive elaboration, bypassing the boundaries of our conscious thought. This concept invited viewers to contemplate the intricate role language plays in the realms of propaganda, media, and primal instincts. Followed Marco Fusinato's "DESASTRES," adapted from a performance shown at the last edition of Venice Biennale’s Australian Pavilion. The stroboscopic wall of guitar noise dictated the rhythm of the appearing and dissolving of compelling images, as a frantic pulse of visual bulimia that nevertheless changed little from its first presentation in Venice.
To close the exhibition’s experience, Billy Bultheel's installation and performance, "The Thief's Journal," seamlessly blended into the Kraftwerk setting. His exploration of psychoacoustic effects, drawing parallels between the sacred and the industrial, utilized the space's reverberations sustained by sparingly hits on hanging metal sheets and drumming sessions. Steve Katona's beautiful singing gave way to windswept brass that intensified up to rippling the waters in which the performers soaked their feet, in a choreography and styling that added a touch of Anne Imhof's fashion flair. Extremely low vibrations of tubas, screeching metal plates, drums, and flashing lights all added to the mesmerizing pulses of intensities and whispering.
As the evening approached and the concert lineup evolved, many other acts intervened on the building's structures throughout the festival. Worth a mention is Blackhaine’s ability to merge sonic and choreographic elements into a visceral dance of existential streetcore, at the limits between drill music, butoh dance, and body performance. "Absurd Matter," a labyrinthine sonic conundrum, spiraled around Shapednoise's experimental sounds and an a/v live show in collaboration with visual artist Sevi Iko Dømochevsky. The intermediality of the video work, projected on a full scale and reflected in fragments on five lower screens, competed with many installations shown at Ars Electronica. In an aesthetic that blended cyberpunk, gaming art, and fluid, compulsive 3D graphics, the work played between hectic narrations of urban creatures and episodic sketches of dark city-life dreams.
Music producer Maya Shenfeld and Portuguese video artist Pedro Maia collaborated on "Under the Sun," an audio-visual show filmed in one of the world's deepest marble quarries in southern Portugal. Through a cycle of electroacoustic pieces, imagery shot under the scorching sun of the hottest summer on record explored the equilibrium and imminent threat of our climate crisis. Mingling artfully Super 8 film and drone shootings, Maia’s unique analog film processing created an immersive live audio-visual journey from human mining in a desertifying earth to the sun and back to the vision of a sustainable future for us all.
While not as dynamically evolving as its predecessor, this year's Atonal art program still showed a rather interesting commitment to exploring the intersection of sound and visual art. The festival's enduring dedication to this curatorial approach, creating a "difference in repetition" of the central theme of metabolism, encompassing ecological, biological, economic, and political dimensions, continues to carry significant impact through which to examine the multifaceted complexities of our contemporary human condition.
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