We live in terrifying times. Dispatches of wars, disasters, and crises circulate with unceasing regularity and ease, while an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness underscores an ever more incomprehensible world at odds with its own logic. The impossible has become possible. Reality is stranger than fiction. The tenth edition of Creamcake’s 3hd, with its title “The Shadows That Linger,” probes this uncanny realm where the ordinary becomes obscure in an “always-already” defined by digital technology, nostalgia, and deterritorialization. Wading deep into this hauntological space between the familiar and the unfamiliar from October 19 to November 3, the festival will examine the spiritual and the ghostly, the ambiguous and the uncertain, alongside those historical, political, cultural, and social relics and reverberations that continue to affect us all.
The interdisciplinary program aims to open up to the political potential of discomfort. In experiencing and engaging with the alien and the otherworldly, “The Shadows That Linger” will spend the present working through the specters of the past in an attempt to transform dread into a drive for a better future. The three-weekend program awakens at RSO (from the team behind the iconic Griessmuehle) with another one of Creamcake and 3hd’s typically epic club takeovers from DJs and live acts like cult electronic music duo Bassvictim, and producer and purveyor of wide-screen melancholia DJH, as well as object blue, Softmatter, and many more. A moving-image program will run alongside the festival at Berlinische Galerie and online at 3hdTV through to November 18 with films by the likes of Abdessamad El Montassir and Micaela Durand & Daniel Chew, among others, exploring themes of death, loss, and the omnipresent digital, physical, and spiritual architectures that haunt our everyday lives.
HAU Hebbel am Ufer hosts the Berlin debut of Goodnight Sweet Thing, a performance art piece directed by Cristine Brache & Sigrid Lauren that invites audiences to reflect on the complexities of masking and societal performance in a philosophical exploration of the human condition. The Betonhalle addition to Silent Green Kulturquartier’s repurposed crematorium complex will host two nights of music and live performance, ritual and ceremony. Here, Oxhy and Susu Laroche’s The Fertile Crescent distill their distinct musical universes into folkloric anthems evocative of ancient time zones and mystic drone metal, while Yawning Portal guides its listeners through “an opening to other worlds, a transmutation, a prayer.” Meanwhile, acclaimed artist Ebecho Muslimova applies her distinctive drawing style to the visual identity of 3hd 2024 by lending her Fatebe alter-ego, and her unsettling, self-conscious, and surreal aesthetic to the cosmic club cubicle of this “The Shadows That Linger” edition.
A decade since its inauguration, the concerns raised in 3hd 2015’s “The Labor of Sound in a World of Debt” seem almost trite compared to the sheer scale and impact of today’s cultural flux, social disparity, and environmental degradation, and the mass violence, destruction, and suffering that continues to unfold globally. Perhaps it’s worth reflecting on this seemingly simpler past as part of a circuitous chain of events leading to the present, while remembering that chains can be broken and shadows do fade.
