A pastoral scene in inner-city Berlin for the second in a series of events celebrating ten-or-so years of Creamcake. The evolving club night and interdisciplinary event platform’s “10/11” anniversary follows a wildly successful birthday party event at Berghain last month, with a more urbane but still spectacular hybrid performance and music evening at Neukölln’s Galerie im Körnerpark, on August 27. Offering an opportunity to convene in the final days of the warmer months, there’s an element of twilight nostalgia to the gathering, as the days again become shorter and the time for rest and reflection comes closer.
Cakes by rustcakes and floral arrangements by Studio Linné set the tone of a low-key banquet for the digital underground, where the former gravel pit-come-Neo-baroque palace garden holds the sounds of its performers and DJs between the orangery and flower garden. In response to these beautiful surroundings, and as one of many recent solutions to the fraught work of community-organizing in an era of pandemic, extreme weather, and shrinking civic space, five artists are invited to share their creative drives and contemplations in the open air of a public park.
Artist and musician Lamin Fofana plays a set contrasting the reality of our world with what’s beyond, examining questions of movement, migration, alienation and belonging. Ndayé Kouagou presents “Four dogs and a plum,” a performance built on self-authored and voluntarily or involuntarily confused texts ruminating on the topics of unease, power and vulnerability. Frankie, aka Franziska Aigner, performs cello, vocals and electronics that explore beauty in the drone—love, loss, hope and desolation hidden in the overtones, while YUI and Larry round off the festivities with respective DJ sets. One applies multiple layers of Japanese pop culture—trampolining from J-pop to choral music, bootlegs to jazz, spoken word to chiptune—delivered in inexpressible emotional layers. The other presents an eclectic selection by the Creamcake co-founder and artistic director, without whom the platform would have never been born in the first place. Long live the queer party.
