“Paradise Found” responds to the extreme conditions of our current Age of Acceleration with a simple, though radical proposition—of nurturing talent and allowing it to develop at its own pace. Happening in the PLAYGROUND – for accepting your mortality garden, flanked by the ruins of a Medieval Franciscan monastery, the event will feature live performance and installations exploring themes of velocity and deceleration, concentration and contemplation, noise and silence, while inviting the listener to linger in its Edenic surroundings. The musicians, composers and producers; performers and artists taking part include up-and-coming talent, alongside their more established counterparts in an effort to reject the high turnover of human capital within the so-called “experience economy” of festivals and cultural events for this Arcadian alternative.
Participants break the sacred axis and orientation of the church—a symbol of convention and institutional power—by examining the subversive potential of queer feminist gestures and agnostic rituals in a historical location. These disruptive and asymmetric relationships make comprehensible the challenge and reality of acceleration, via their own marginality. These are the peripheries that become active and accessible at the liminal borders of electronic music.
Bringing together a spectrum of experimental and progressive sonic and cross-genre live acts, “Paradise Found” presents a diversity of sound, timbre, volume and speed in an effort to probe the affective and somatic possibilities of music to inscribe both calming and unsettling moments in an environment. Between organic and inorganic objects and elements, atmospherically charged fields form around the audience to allow for free movement within each idiosyncratic experience. Musical vibrations transmit between bodies of all kinds —people, plants, these crumbling monastic walls—creating a lively and reactive presence that absorbs and releases cyclic energy.
“Paradise Found” is a conceptual biotope. It is a living space in which a spontaneous community can develop and flourish. A garden of elemental encounters and pauses, of desires and longings, the Franziskaner-Klosterkirche ruins become a shelter for preserving this vital orchard of diversity and hybridity. On the other hand, it also emphasizes the urgent care and attention that such a cultivated space requires.
The English word “curation” comes from the Latin curare, which means “to cure” or “take care of”. Creamcake looks to focus on this idea of caring, of tending to their existing networks and their associated discourses in the long-term through “Paradise Found”. That’s why invited artists included many who have worked with the platform before, with the aim of supporting these growing practices more sustainably with sufficient resources and infrastructure. It is only through empowerment, cooperation and connection in our community that curation can be a nourishing activity in an accelerated music and art scene.
