WE ARE BEGINNERS: FOR LIFE

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Sporting its brand new festival date, Elevate has paved the way into a new world. This year’s Music and Arts lineup connects the tried and true, the unexplored and the forthcoming.

For the first time since its inception more than 12 years ago, Elevate is on course for its first-ever spring edition. While a new authority of tyrants continues their shameless hate mongering and the introduction of alternative facts makes it that much harder to implement real alternatives, while multitudes of computers attempt to measure humankind as whole until all life can be managed as a tiny little pixel within a gigantic data cloud, we choose to remind ourselves of spring. Because now, at the intersection of contemporary art and clubbing, where counterculture meets hedonism and live shows and DJs make the daily struggle for a better world that much more bearable, the sun will   shine just a little bit longer. Elevate is migrating to spring and the season couldn’t be any more fitting. The days get warmer, the music louder and hearts more open. With this in mind, the upcoming edition of Elevate would like to symbolise departure, change and new beginnings. A break in tradition and a seamless transition. From disturbing noise to harmony, from activism to a beat, from the underground to knocking on the doors of the mainstream and above all: from the freedom of an individual to a globally interconnected totality.

The Music and Arts programme for this year is based around the transition from the accustomed to the forthcoming. The many different bills combine live shows with media art, DJ lines with text performances and trailblazing pioneers with niche genres barely anybody has heard of. In speaking with the several programming partners, the course was set to move ever closer to the fruitful areas of friction between societies, music, art and science. A perfect match for spring, which (much like contemporary festival organisation) leaves the ossified behind in order to make way for the elements that arise when the natural order of things is threatening to topple.

As a part of We Are Europe, a portion of the Elevate stages are co-curated together with the seven selected programming partners and have been sine 2016. This year kicks off with Sónar Festival from Barcelona who are known for their combination of multimedia art and electronic music. Alongside local greats such as the jazz quartet of Sixtus Preiss, we will also see the live premier of the Zanshin and Alba G. Corral collaboration. The dada trash performance art by the pop funk crossover Americans KNOWERM and the flutedrop originator DJ Detweiler are only very few of the many highlights this year.

However, before the concert and club activity gets underway, Forum Stadtpark will take the time to introduce a special format in the Forum’s cellar. As an experimental seque of sorts, programming partner hoereREDE present SUPERANDOME, a premiere performance by the young Grazean playwrite Natascha Gangl. It will be performed as a live four-channel audio piece, produced in collaboration with sound architect Rdeča Raketa. The piece deals with the overlaying festival theme of Algorithmic Regimes. Another bridge between the discourse and music portion will also be contributed by hoergeREDE during the opening ceremony. The young multimedia poet ORAVIN will present two short self-produced video works, accompanied by live citation of lyrics which deal with two central groups of themes in the discourse portion: City of Tomorrow & Quantification of Nature. Another premiere will be staged by the popular Forum Stadtpark series DUNKELKAMMER - this instalment being carried out by the Kutin/Kindlinger behemoth as well as the acoustic fragility of Susanna Gartmayer’s sensational solo debut AOUIE.

Insomnia Festival presents the widely acclaimed Norwegian artist Jenny Hval, who is poised to deliver another one of her emphatic live performances. IDM producer TCF subverts crypto-building blocks in his compositions which reveal a lot more than sonic references to the Tea Party and facial recognition technology. Further highlights include duo Paranoid London and Lorenzo Senni, whose trailblazing Quantum Jelly album brought pointillism to the club. Detroit techno godfather Juan Atkins, Lolina aka Inga Copeland, Danish sound artist SØS Gunver Ryberg, US dark synth musicians Tropics of Cancer and a whole lot of Austrian talent the likes of Clara Moto, Pulsinger + Sam Irl and ZSAMM are prime examples of this year’s deep and diverse lineup.

Sunday is set up to send the festival off with the usual bang when internationally beloved local heroes Radian bring their latest Thrill Jockey release to the stage next to Portuguese free jazz trio Hintai/Maranha/Ferrandini and to top it all off: the drone pope Stephen O’Malley himself who is not only known for his titanic feedback loops with the legendary SunnO))).

"The Elevate Festival for contemporary music, art and political discourse distinguishes itself through its far-reaching commitment that continues to shed light onto new and surprising perspectives.

In my professional life, I am continuously confronted with the potential to enter new spaces, to step into the unknown, and I am reminded daily of how important it is for a society to invest in contemporary art." Stefan Stolitzka

In Central Europe, contemporary art and its communication has undergone decades of dynamic development, which is internationally recognized and a regionally important basis for a high quality of life. Stefan Stolitzka, owner of the shoe factory Legero, has been supporting contemporary art in Austria and abroad for years, and has established the platform www.con-tempus.eu in 2011. The aim of this platform is not only to preserve the diversity and high quality of contemporary art for the future, but to ensure its continued development.