3hd 2018 is kicking of this year’s program with an earth-shifting presage event called “Takedown” at Berlin’s stunning Gothic relic, Klosterruine Berlin. The program follows the hybrid festival theme of “System.Lure”, examining the powerful structures that dominate our world. Located in the city’s central borough of Mitte, the Franciscan monastery church is a singular example of architecture from the late Middle Ages, set in the historic and present heart of the German capital.
“Takedown” 3hd 2018 also constitutes the end of the dead are losing or how to ruin an exhibition – a performance program and exhibition hybrid, that’s been taking place this summer; an exhibition that “assembles performance artists in a ruin and then ruins that, too.” Artists respond to the architecture of the space to create their own speculative environments. Two of these performers work with the reverse hierarchy of folk culture and collective resistance, a disruption to institutional power and reclaiming of identity in their music and aesthetic.
London-based producer felicita excavates his dual heritage as an Anglo-Polish artist through Slavic music and dance. He explores the emancipatory quality of national pride and revived tradition on one end, and its deeply conservative adopters on the other. Meanwhile, the intersections of psychosis, colonization, generational trauma, and spirituality within the African diaspora is of central concern to New York-based artist and musician YATTA. Their incantations born of loop pedal drones, folk acoustics, and electronic beats, they alchemize and creolize jazz vocals with Krio cries to create music in which to lie down.
The building’s long and eventful history reflects that of Berlin’s — as a church of the ruling Catholic faith that survived the Protestant Reformation before being reduced to rubble during the Second World War. Its ruins were dismantled when Mitte was still split by the GDR Berlin Wall, then restored at the turn of the millennium. Now a space for art run by the district Mitte of Berlin, the Klosterruine’s idyllic surroundings stand as a final stronghold against another disintegrating institution, a symbol of survival in these late-capitalist end times.
