by Dagmara Genda // Mar. 31, 2026
Sound as haptic, spatial and architectural experience remained in the spotlight this year at MaerzMusik, but the promising interplay between different senses was a case of practice falling short of theory. “No Strings Attached” was the slogan for 2026, where vague statements about “being together” in “a moment marked by uncertainty, rupture and possibility” didn’t seem to take any particular form. Seen from a charitable perspective, vagueness can be a survival tactic. The year, after all, did start off with Germany’s Minister of State for Culture, the CDU-appointed Wolfram Weimer, calling for the removal of Berlinale Director Tricia Tuttle, blocking the eligibility of three nominated businesses for the German Bookstore Prize, stopping the expansion of the German National Library and calling into question the independence of juries for cultural funding—all this before the start of April. Perhaps it’s not surprising that increasing authoritarian specificity is inversely related to growing artistic evasiveness. In the introduction to the festival catalog, we read that amid challenges such as shrinking funding and society’s evolving relationship to culture (surely a euphemism, but for what?) collaborations remain central. This is always, at least in part, a pragmatic choice. Institutional collaborations pool resources, save on costs and expand respective audiences, but too many may also water down vision. Just as this year’s spike in venues across the city initially seemed like an exciting exchange, the geographical spread became symptomatic of a festival rendered anchorless, as if trying to be too many things at once: social, popular, intimate, spectacular, old and new. In this respect a few well-tied strings could have helped ground the program, so as not to leave the feeling of so many loose ends.
Georg Friedrich Haas: ‘11.000 Strings,’ 2003, Berliner Festspiele // Photo by Camille Blake
The biggest loose end was the lack of a strong finale. It was a pale refrain of last’s year carefully choreographed subversion of the concert hall, where a collective of strangers took form through the seemingly effortless guiding of the audience through the halls, stages, basement and back rooms of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. 2025’s experience unfolded like an immersive film that gently pulled you into the action, and only made you aware of your role at the very end when the curtains opened with you on stage, as the audience-turned-performer. Still bearing the same title ‘I AM ALL EARS,’ this year’s event was hollowed of any dramaturgical finesse. The theater wasn’t treated as a series of codes, but simply a number of rooms that people could enter according to a time slot and loiter as they pleased. The installation-art-influenced protocol could have just as well have occurred anywhere. There was no blurring of performer and audience, of reception and spectacle. There were just a series of stations more or less artfully produced. Moreover, the supposedly social reconfiguration of the building made it paradoxically less open. Instead of being ticketed at the door to the auditorium, one required a ticket to enter the foyer, thus making the normally open, communal space of the MaerzMusik library only available to paying guests.
Pauline Oliveros: ‘The Single Stroke Roll Meditation,’ 1988, Große Bühne // Photo by Camille Blake
When the norms of the theater are subverted by the norms of the gallery space, you risk trading one set of institutional problems for the other. The only work in the finale that avoided this trap was the first. Occupying the bulk of the theater’s seating space was Ray Lee’s ‘Siren’ (2004), which consisted of spindly transmission-tower-like forms casting ominous shadows up to the ceiling. Conspicuously missing was any hint of a stage. Instead the front of the theater was blocked by a fortified black wall. Each tower was topped by a long pole with a speaker at either end. When the pole spun, the speakers emitted wailing electronic drones that pulsated throughout the room. In that moment, the shadows on the walls resembled hovering helicopters, a connotation appropriate for a work first developed as an installation in a former US Air Force base. The kinetic spectacle, in all its blinking, technological indifference, evoked surveillance and sonic warfare. And true to this invasive reference, its sound leaked into the next room, which was the stage itself. This was an unfortunate detriment to the more subtle works, like Pauline Oliveros’ ‘The Single Stroke Roll Meditation’ (1988). It was also on the stage that the festival’s ideal of sound teaching us “new ways of living together” was first tinged by the art gallery reality of drawn out media works with not enough comfortable seating. Some visitors made themselves at home by arranging multiple floor cushions into veritable beds, while others made do on the wooden floor.
Ash Fure: ‘Interior Listening Protocol No 1,’ 2022, backstage // Photo by Camille Blake
Back stage Ash Fure’s video ‘Interior Listening Protocol No 1’ (2022) featured the artist’s face perplexingly filtered through video effects holding two jars to her ears and moving them around. The audience was instructed to emulate the artist-avatar so as to take part in a participative score, and like in many video installations, people tended to drop out mid-work. Wojciech Blecharz’s yoga mats topped with vibrating pillows were also a case of practice falling short of intention. The tight grid of mats was more like a sardine can than a relaxation room. Most people lay down in the same direction so as not to stare into the face of the person uncomfortably close beside them, a reality I experienced when I reclined the wrong way and the woman next to me politely turned around. Moreover, Blecharz’s experiment in bodily experience and relaxation is preceded by former MaerzMusik Director Berno Odo Polzer’s more radical and successful 30-hour continuous concert and installation event, ‘The Long Now,’ where visitors ate, slept, lived and listened together in Berlin’s Kraftwerk.
Wojciech Blecharz // Photo by Camille Blake
Though the uninspired finale mirrored the quality of the festival as a whole, there were a few stand-out moments worth mentioning. One of these was a reading performance by Louis Chude-Sokei accompanied by electronics from Jan St. Werner. The writer and academic offered a refreshingly nuanced take on collectivity by admitting the impossibility of belonging, discussing the poetics of migration, as well as including a sensitive critique of identity politics—memorably summarized in the line “identity is not a church, it is a brothel.” In his fluidly recited essay, Chude-Sokei repudiated the nation as a viable community and proposed, as he writes in his catalog text, “a world where all are displaced but speaking themselves into new relationships.” The returning refrain, “No Nation but the Imagination,” formed the rhythmic backbone to his meditation on voice and sound, which included both the humble assertion and radical challenge, of the voice not belonging to the speaker. Together with St. Werner’s electronic mixing, the performance embodied a discursive structure that relied on musical technique, rather than the usual strategies of rhetoric, argumentation or theatrical narrative. The performance could have been a eulogy for old forms of dialogue rendered ineffective in our current political moment, but also a sincere effort to craft new ways of speaking.
In the end one could leave with the question of how much a particular structure has to be subverted in to achieve a communal moment? Arguably an exemplary concert can do that to an audience even if they stay firmly rooted in their seats. Georg Friedrich Haas’ ‘11,000 Strings’ (2003), which opened the festival, brought the public to nothing short of a state of rapture. 50 upright pianos, each tuned two cents apart, resulting in a difference of a half-tone minus two cents between the first and last instrument, were arranged in a large circle and played in combination with other instruments by Klangforum Wien. Sonic pulsations and repeated motifs moved between an almost clichéd familiarity and a threatening uncanny that blanketed the audience sitting inside the ring of instruments. The surround-sound effect was more than immersive; it was like an island on which we were stranded, where sounds beat at the shores like waves, where pulses morphed, superficially repeated, crashed toward us somehow always slightly changed. We were encircled by sound in a stasis of anticipation that felt inexplicably contemporary, like the expectant tension of a video game soundtrack or an overly-sweet refrain played again and again on a wonky, stretched-out cassette tape. After the concert people stood up, both contemplative and dazed, and began trying to articulate their experience to themselves and to each other.
Georg Friedrich Haas: ‘11.000 Strings,’ 2003, Berliner Festspiele // Photo by Camille Blake
In these moments of estranged familiarity a kind of imperfect, common language can emerge, where individuals hear the same thing in different ways, where collectivity is a dissonant microtonal chord of unstable difference or a voice acknowledging its own strangeness and thus (hopefully) the resulting nearness of the other. And while it might be sorely disappointing to now forward the claim that art can’t form community, just as it likely won’t save a threatened democracy, it certainly is a signpost and a symptom of a world functioning as it should (or could)—namely, a world in which people, to return to Chude-Sokei, “speak themselves into new relationships,” even if, as he also admits, this “world does not exist. Yet.”
