FESTIVAL FOR TIME ISSUES
MAERZMUSIK
Berliner Festspiele · 2015–2022
An eight-year journey into time and timeless moments of listening…
Thanks to the core festival team, in changing constellations: Ilse Müller, Ina Steffan, Sonia Lescène, Helen Boysen, Magdalena Ritter, Linda Sepp, as well as the entire team of Berliner Festspiele and Thomas Oberender for enabling work in a spirit of artistic and intellectual freedom.
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Program Archive · Berliner Festspiele · MaerzMusik 2015–2022
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Media Library · Berliner Festspiele · MaerzMusik 2015–2022
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Book "Changes" · Berliner Festspiele 2012–2021
MAERZMUSIK
FESTIVAL FOR TIME ISSUES
2022
"The visible and invisible relations that hold everything together, in music and beyond, mark the point of departure for MaerzMusik 2022. Sensing the forces of uncertainty, vulnerability, and transformations in our present, we want to evoke the question of how to relate in different and diverse ways. One of the guiding metaphors in this quest is the mycelium, the vast fungal network of branching filaments that pervade the soil, traversing species and milieus, connecting, supporting, signaling, communicating, decomposing, detoxifying, and healing in ways that are yet to be understood." (Editorial 2022, excerpt.)
Curated in collaboration with Kamila Metwaly
Production: Sonia Lescène, Ina Steffan, Helena Boysen
Material MaerzMusik 2022
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MaerzMusik 2022 Program
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Media Library MaerzMusik 2022
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Program Archive MaerzMusik 2022
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MaerzMusik Finale · Cashmere Radio
MAERZMUSIK
FESTIVAL FOR TIME ISSUES
2021
A festival without live audience at the hight of the COVID-19 pandemic
“Online Time is different, we are aware of it. The shared experience of live art in real time and real space is irreplaceable. But MaerzMusik is determined to taking place, to staying live and open as a site of creation and encounter, of listening and thinking together.
MaerzMusik 2021 is a place where many streams flow together: concerts, performances, films and talks – live or pre-produced – are connecting physical locations in Berlin with many private apartments and studios around the world, where music, language and moving images are being created for this festival.
It is a remarkable irony, from the perspective of this Festival for Time Issues, that last year’s edition on “The Beginning of Time” was canceled only to merge with this year’s preplanned issue on “The End of Time”. After all, questioning and transgressing the normative framework of linear time bracketed by a beginning and an end has been one of the driving forces of the last six years. So here we are, at a point where beginning and end converge thematically in a present that unsettles our perspectives onto the future (and the past) in a breathtaking way.” (Editorial 2021, excerpt.)
Production: Ilse Müller, Ina Steffan, Helena Boysen, Anna Crespo Palomar
Material MaerzMusik 2021
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MaerzMusik 2021 Flyer
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Program Archive MaerzMusik 2021
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Timepiece Timetable
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Media Library 2021
MAERZMUSIK
FESTIVAL FOR TIME ISSUES
2020
A fully planned festival that never was: nine days before its opening, MaerzMusik 2020 was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Little did we know when this editorial was written:
“MaerzMusik 2020 revolves around a simple and powerful idea: the beginning of time. A notion so common and naturalized, that its peculiarity, even strangeness, often goes unnoticed. Across geographies, times, and cultures, humans have tried to account for that which cannot be known. Whether in the form of creation myths or scientific theories, these governing narratives that construct origins beyond the human grasp reveal their inventors’ relation to the world, their philosophies, assumptions, imaginaries, as well as their politics.
The sixth edition of this Festival for Time Issues draws its energy from the poetics and the politics of Time Immemorial — a temporality that eludes control and computability: sounds and practices rooted in cosmologies not circumscribed by a beginning and an end; sounds that reach into the deep space of time, unknowable but sensible; voices that speak, whisper or scream untold stories past and present. Together, they form MaerzMusik 2020, ten days of interrelated concerts, audio-visual performances, film screenings, readings, public conversations and an exhibition that destabilise the notions of beginning and origin.” (Editorial 2020, excerpt.)
Production: Ilse Müller, Ina Steffan, Linda Sepp, Helena Boysen
Material MaerzMusik 2020
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MaerzMusik 2020 Print Program
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MaerzMusik 2020 Reader Contents
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The Long Now 2020
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MaerzMusik 2020 Program Archive
MAERZMUSIK
FESTIVAL FOR TIME ISSUES
2019
“This may be an odd time for dealing with history. Absorbed and overpowered as we are by a precarious present and an uncertain future, “looking back” may seem like a waste of time. We may be tired of dealing with things past: exhausted as we are by a culture of retrospection that celebrates the past as a given outshining the present. We may be weary of reading the old tales of progress, enlightenment and civilisation, as we count the costs of its achievements: environmental degradation and the destruction of life on earth. We may want to look somewhere else, away from the unlikely resurfacing before our eyes, of dark political forces we had wishfully relegated to the dustbin of history. While history is being written in real time and at 280 characters apiece, the lengthy historiographical struggle around facts and fakeness has acquired a bitter aftertaste. This may be a bad time for history.
Nevertheless – or rather therefore – the fifth edition of this “Festival for Time Issues” dedicates its 10 days to questions pertaining to history and historiography. History understood as an alive, animate, spirited realm that reaches deep into the now. History as an extension of the present even, the practice of which determines how we stand in the now and how we move into tomorrow. Through a politically focused lens of time we might be able to see the variegated politics behind historically contingent philosophies of history – including our own – and how they influence, in turn, our ways of relating to the past, our views onto the present and our ability to shape the future." (Editorial 2019, excerpt.)
Production: Ilse Müller, Ina Steffan, Linda Sepp
Material MaerzMusik 2019
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MaerzMusik 2019 Program
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Tele-Visions Program
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Thinking Together 2019
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Media Library 2019
MAERZMUSIK
FESTIVAL FOR TIME ISSUES
2018
"'Music offers time a centre.’ — This trope by John Berger puts the two main concerns of this festival, music and time, into a generative relation. Such a centre — in motion, elusive, non-geometric, plurimodal as it must be — would allow for a different point of view. From such a musical centre, one may sense the divergent temporalities each of us inhabits simultaneously, and draw relations to the ongoing fundamental transformations happening around us. This is a time for listening.
Under the title Time Wars this Festival for Time Issues proposes to probe the current state of affairs through the lens of time and through listening, to collectively consider what today’s experience of “being in time” is, on a daily basis, exposed as we are to diverging and colliding temporal force fields: flexibilisation, fragmentation and the maxing out of capacities; time horizons shrunk, stretched and warped; the vertigo of reciprocal speed and slowness; the loss of temporal claim and agency. Our hypothesis is that a war is raging between temporalities. Less obvious, perhaps, than today’s countless other conflicts, but no less real." (Editorial 2018, excerpt.)
Production: Ilse Müller, Ina Steffan, Linda Sepp
Material MaerzMusik 2018
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MaerzMusik 2018 Program
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Thinking Together 2018
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The Long Now 2018
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Media Library 2018
MAERZMUSIK
FESTIVAL FOR TIME ISSUES
2017
"In March 2015, during the first edition of this Festival for Time Issues, few would have doubted the fundamental stability of Western democracies.The European Union seemed too big to fail; “refugee crisis” was not a familiar term on the continent, and terror attacks were still an exception, at least for a majority of Europeans dormant in the assumption that their castle of privilege was self-maintaining, impregnable and secure. In the second edition in March 2016, “truth” and “politics” were at odds as ever, but “post-truth” politics, the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of that year, did not yet ring a bell for many, least an alarm bell triggered by the Brexit vote and the US presidential elections. Two random years overlapping with the last editions of MaerzMusik — Festival for Time Issues. — Two years, long enough to give rise to a markedly different world.
Once, it is being said, festivals were celebrated to mark and defy time — measures for change, vessels for collective memory, self-reassurances and celebration of community. It is tempting to aspire to this notion of festival again today. The question remains, and is more pressing than ever: What can a festival located in the midst of Europe be today? How can it relate to the violence, degradation, instability and fear that surround “us”? How can it reflect, address and be home to a new “us” that is arising in the wake of the rapid reorganisation of local and global affairs? How can a festival live up to the fact that it is a public, communal and hence a political space?”
This year’s focus on Decolonizing Time critically reflects Western-centric time regimes. The linear, unidirectional, measurable, clock-based chrono-normative matrix of Western modernity encoded in notions like “universal time”, “universal history”, “progress”, or “contemporaneity” is the clockface of coloniality. “Thinking Together” 2017 seeks to investigate the chrono-politics of modernity, in search for a multiplicity of decolonized temporalities.” (Editorial 2017, excerpt.)
Production: Ilse Müller, Ina Steffan, Magdalena Ritter
Material MaerzMusik 2017
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MaerzMusik 2017 Program
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MaerzMusik 2017 Calendar
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Thinking Together 2017
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The Long Now 2017
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Program Archive 2017
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Media Library 2017
MAERZMUSIK
FESTIVAL FOR TIME ISSUES
2016
“The second edition of this newly devised Festival for Time Issues under the title “Time and the Digital Universe“ imagines and problematises the Digital Universe as the birthplace of new forms of time and temporality — digital time that shapes our lives. The global real-time put into effect by digital technologies makes itself felt, collapse spatial distance, sets new standards of pace and creates facts in lapses of time far below the human threshold of perception; it opens up free space and free time undreamed of, only to clog them at once with innumerable options, offers and promises delivered constantly by digital capitalism. “What happens to our time?” — This frequently asked question acquires a different colour in the light of digital temporalities.” (Editorial 2016, excerpt.)
Production: Ilse Müller, Ina Steffan, Magdalena Ritter
Material MaerzMusik 2016
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MaerzMusik 2016 Program
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Thinking Together 2016
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The Long Now 2016
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MaerzMusik 2016 taz Feature
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Program Archive 2016
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Media Library 2016
MAERZMUSIK
FESTIVAL FOR TIME ISSUES
2015
"A Festival for Time issues — that is a place devoted to our most valuable resource: time. Time, understood as a dimension of experience equally accessible to each and every one. A phenomenon that resists reduction and definition. A medium of music and the arts that transcends chronological and efficiency-oriented regimes. But also: Time as a political category that determines the ways we live, work and produce — a concept and invention in service of ideological and economic interests; an instrument of power setting the beat and dictating the rhythm; a dimension of the imaginary that influences our vision of futurity and our freedom of action. Time as a notion of agency for contemporaries, individuals and societies.
The newly devised festival MaerzMusik is a space for artistic experiences, encounters and debates revolving around our relation to time. Developed from the perspective of listening and carried by the rhythms of the present and the future, it offers a public space where life, art and theory, perception and reflexion may converge.
We cordially invite you to share this time and this space — a garden of forking paths: concerts, performances, installations, film presentations and discourse formats revolving around our relation to time. Moments, we hope, that will stay with you; days and hours that pass by in a flash; times dilated, stretched, warped, condensed, accelerated, anachronous, interrupted, stopped and wasted – shared and lived time.” (Editorial 2015, excerpt.)
Production: Ilse Müller, Ina Steffan, Magdalena Ritter
Material MaerzMusik 2015
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MaerzMusik 2015 Program
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Thinking Together 2015
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The Long Now 2015
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MaerzMusik 2015 taz Feature
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Program Archive 2015
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Media Library 2015