Documentation

CTM 2020 Festival in Review

A selection of CTM 2020 coverage that can be found online, plus the festival in sound and image.

Programme

The full CTM music, discourse, and exhibition programme – day and night.

CTM 2020 Passes & Tickets

Festival Passes and tickets to certain individual events are available via our ticket shop. Limited quantity.

CTM 2020 Exhibition

Interstitial Spaces

With the CTM 2020 exhibition, Interstitial Spaces, the festival presents a number of ways of using space and presence to think through liminality, ambivalence, ambiguity, and shift. Whether through carrying memory, embodying change, or catalysing affects, spaces—be they physical, social, or ideological—command multiple means of engagement.

CTM 2020 Theme

Liminal

Liminal phenomena and liminoid states are transitional phases in which a familiar order sees its values and symbols destabilised; norms are suspended or turned on their heads. We find ourselves in ambiguous spaces, somewhere between a past that is no longer valid and an ever-becoming future. With the theme "Liminal," CTM 2020 throws itself into limbo in hopes of stimulating a critical discussion of our present and possible futures.

Spatial Sound Installation

"You Will Go Away One Day But I Will Not"

With “You Will Go Away One Day But I Will Not,” Maria Thereza Alves and Lucrecia Dalt present a new commissioned work at the Botanic Garden Berlin that considers the Western practice of using Western scientific nomenclature to name plants worldwide. The audience is invited to walk through the tropical greenhouse wearing headphones that track each user’s movements to generate individualised binaural sonic experiences.

Open Collaborative Laboratory

MusicMakers Hacklab

MusicMakers Hacklab is a weeklong open, collaborative laboratory hosted by Peter Kirn, and philippie artist Tad Ermitaño. It allows practitioners from a range of disciplines to find new ways of exploring cross-cultural hybrids that imagine future topographies of sound and music performance. This year’s hacklab focuses on how performance practice and invention can change the performer—making them someone or something else, making them newly visible, or making them entirely invisible. Open to walk-ins from the public, the Hacklab also features four Input talks by artists/technologists. Hacklab fellows will present the culmination of their week of experimentation at the Hacklab Finale on Sunday February 2nd.

Discourse

Research Networking Day

The Research Networking Day provides a platform to exchange ideas and experiences for students and researchers from different European graduate and postgraduate programmes traversing the fields of audio, arts, media, design and related theoretical disciplines. The 2020 participants and programme is now announced! Thematic modules will focus on the potentials for transcendent experiences in clubs and club cultures, on the relationship of sound and conflict, and on voice as a transmitter of identity and ideas.

Somatic Workshop and Longform Club Night

Technosomatics / Dance is Ancient

Frédéric Gies presents a “Technosomatics” movement workshop at HAU2 where participants individually and collectively explore their endocrine systems and chakras through dancing, and vice versa. The following day, Berghain resident Fiedel delivers seven hours of hypnotic techno, while attendees are invited to join Gies, who dances throughout the evening. Together, they create a catalyst for the audience’s participation in dance and trance. 

Immersive Experience

Hive Rise

Entering Berghain is like accessing another sphere of perception. With "Hive Rise," Ashley Fure and Lilleth Glimcher dig into this site-specific terrain with a cast of ten performers wielding custom 3D-printed megaphones.

Participatory robotic performance

Inferno

In a dark take on technology and control, Louis-Philippe Demers & Bill Vorn present “Inferno,” exploring many persistent anxieties around the relationships between humans and technologies, and the shifting boundaries between. “Inferno” envisions infinite punishment as endless automation and subordination to the machine, as participants are drawn to the spectacles and thrills of submission.

Persistence & evolution of a threatened dance culture

Drops and Seeds

Referencing the brutal Khmer Rouge genocide of the 1970s, “Drops and Seeds” marks the persistence and evolution of Khmer classical dance, which today rests on the shoulders of merely a handful of artists. The project is created by choreographer Prumsodun Ok, founder of Cambodia’s first openly gay dance company, NATYARASA; and Berlin-based composer Ana Maria Rodríguez, with light design by Fred Pommerehn and music performed by Ensemble KNM.

Connecting Radio Art & Performance

CTM 2020 Radio Lab

The CTM Radio Lab is dedicated to exploring the pairing of the specific artistic possibilities of radio with the potentials of live performance or installation. This year the Lab will support new works by Dani Gal & Ghazi Barakat as well as the duo NUM (Maryam Sirvan & Milad Bagheri). The Radio Lab is commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur – Hörspiel/Klangkunst and CTM Festival, in collaboration Ö1 Kunstradio, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, and Goethe-Institut. Media partner: The Wire.

Installation

HLLW HWL

Does emptiness have a voice? In sergey kasich’s expansive installation, Hollow Howl, a variety of objects distributed throughout the exhibition space serve as passively resonating, reflecting, and absorbing surfaces. Individual microphones attached to these objects capture air movements.

Installation and Performance

Bergama Stereo

With “Bergama Stereo,” Istanbul-based artist and musician Cevdet Erek uses the sonic to explore the lasting architectural legacy of the Pergamon Altar. CTM is pleased to highlight the ongoing installation at Hamburger Bahnhof.

Focus on Southeast Asia

Nusasonic at CTM

Adopting a multi-perspective approach, Nusasonic is a collaboration between CTM Festival and Yes No Klub (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), WSK Festival for the Recently Possible (Manila, The Philippines), and Playfreely/BlackKaji (Singapore) that explores how contemporary sound practices enable connections and dialogues within the Southeast Asian region, and with Europe. A number of Nusasonic-supported artists will appear at CTM 2020. 

Citywide Partner Programme

Vorspiel 2020

Vorspiel is a citywide programme of events created by Berlin project spaces, collectives, communities etc before and during the transmediale and CTM festivals. Vorspiel 2020 will launch with an opening event on 17 January 2020 at ACUD Macht Neu.

CTM Partner Festival

transmediale 2020

As in previous years, the CTM Festival will take place parallel to and in collaboration with transmediale festival. In 2020, transmediale will extend into the heart of the city: closely linked to the central one-month group exhibition The Eternal Network at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the two-day symposium of the 33rd festival edition will take place at Volksbühne Berlin for the very first time. CTM and transmediale will again produce a number of collaborative programmes, including the the city-wide partner programme Vorspiel.

Multi-year Collaboration

Nyege Nyege x CTM

Uganda's famed Nyege Nyege Festival and CTM continue a fruitful, vibrant collaboration. Commissioned works from DJ Scotch Egg with Khanja & MC Yallah, and Gabber Modus Operandi feat Wahono and Nakibembe Xylphone Troupe lead the list of highlights this year.

A Highlight of Canadian Artists

Canadian Focus at CTM 2020

CTM 2020 features a strong presence of Canadian artists, most notably with the presentation of "Frontera" at the opening concert, and with interactive robotic performance "Inferno."

A Highlight of Nordic Artists

Nordic Focus at CTM 2020

CTM 2020 features a strong presence of Nordic artists, notably through a new thematic listening concert series at silent green's Betonhalle venue.

Sound Heterogeneous Art and Performance in Europe

SHAPE X CTM

Renewed for four more years and co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, the SHAPE project reunites 16 European non-profit organisations active within the ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound network to create a platform that aims to support, promote, and exchange innovative and aspiring emergent musicians and interdisciplinary artists with an interest in sound. Several supported artists and educational / networking initiatives appear at CTM 2019.