#easterndazexberlin

From March to September 2021

As the world is unraveling this past year, cultural events in physical space remain postponed indefinitely. Most of these happenings have shifted online with artists and audiences atomized across the world, connecting via 0s and 1s. With Easterndaze x Berlin, the connection between communities and collectives will be symbolic - it will not happen physically per se, nor via online streams or virtual get-togethers. The collaborations will take place in the form of a compilation and zine, a video installation, a week-long community radio marathon, and a presentation of historical and contemporary music videos.

"An Embrace" is a collaborative project between the Bulgarian experimental music collective Amek and the German music label Vaagner. “An Embrace” is a mutual undertaking which aims to create a bridge between two communities from different cultural environments in Eastern and Western Europe, by pairing artists from the respective regions into four duos. The final results will be compiled and presented as a joint release of Amek and Vaagner, comprising both a limited edition cassette tape, and an accompanying riso-printed zine - formats that have been the key element of DIY labels and initiatives for many decades. The zine will offer further insight into the creative process of the release, including interviews with the artists and information about the activities of the labels involved.

The Double is an immersive installation by Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus (Hydrangea), presented by Subtext Recordings. The Double is part of a fictitious quantum entangled network of European colonial gardens with which the artist duo is engaging. In The Double, botanical spaces are problematised, as sites of camouflaged violence, of appropriation and deletion. This iteration of the work takes place on the twin islands of Bärenzwinger, formerly used to cage captive city bears, and engages with the history of Köllnischer Park, once owned by the Freemason lodge. The Double will be presented to limited audiences as listening sessions on the evenings of 10, 11, 12 September 2021. Community radios from Central and Eastern Europe will connect through the Easterndaze x Berlin platform in an effort to encourage collaboration between these DIY mediums which play a crucial role in their respective artistic and community milieus (being implicitly political, especially in Poland and Hungary). The project’s participants are these community radios from Central or Eastern Europe: Radio Kapital from Warsaw, Lahmacun Radio from Budapest and IDA Radio from Tallinn/Helsinki, hosted by Berlin's Cashmere Radio. The project will encompass a week-long collaborative programming (including swapping shows and moderators - ie. a Cashmere Radio show would be moderated and presented - in a way remixed, or recontextualised - on Lahmacun by their own moderators, etc). The week will culminate in a live broadcasting session and a panel talk about the issue of community radios on Friday, 23 April.

A selection of current and past music videos from the CEE region will be shown at Zönotéka in Berlin's Neukölln, a collaboration with the Klipzona project, an archive of audiovisual music from Central and Eastern Europe, from the 1960s to the present.

Design: Elod Janky: http://elodjanky.com/ More information: https://berlin.easterndaze.net/

ABOUT EASTERNDAZE X BERLIN

Easterndaze x Berlin first took place in 2016 as a music festival and film series geared to present music from Eastern European DIY music scenes in Berlin, where music from Eastern European countries is underrepresented despite the city’s proximity to Central and Eastern Europe, drawing on the Easterndaze project which aims to inform about underground music of the CEE region. Other key aims were the facilitation of cooperation and networking of these scenes and contributing in a small way to changing the exoticizing discourse often still rooted in Cold War clichés.