What does it mean to get closer again? We face a landscape in which we try to recover intimacy and shared experience after social distancing, but in which geographical distances take on greater meaning. In the spirit of adaptation – personal, artistic, and collaborative – this year’s theme for MusicMakers Hacklab again responds to a crisis around us. After a fully virtual year in 2021, this upcoming Hacklab takes a first step back into in-person collaboration with an open call for participants based in Berlin. This year’s fellows are invited to consider intimacy and physical proximity in their Hacklab creations, but also how they might reshape their own artistic identities or local communities/scenes, building unfamiliar selves while remaining in a familiar city/place.
The 2022 Hacklab returns to Kunstquartier Bethanien, a former hospital and squat, longtime home to CTM and the initiative's first-ever venue. Reflecting on what it means to be local in a particular moment – what defines our place in Berlin as people who have come from here and afar, whether one was born here or just arrived this week – this Hacklab edition aims to give back to a location via experimentation and performance. Locations need not be built on stability - the spirit of these experiments is also to play inside displacement and uncertainty.
The Hacklab will take place at AL.Berlin, a cafe/bar and cultural center, which also hosts its own musical festival & artistic rendez-vouz for Berlin's contemporary music & arts scene. Since February 2020, AL.Berlin resides in the Remise Im Hinterhof on Skalitzer Str. 114 in Kreuzberg.
Following an intensive week of collaboration, 2022 fellows will premiere their new musical ideas and works at the Hacklab Finale performance in Studio 1 of Kunstquartier Bethanien on Sunday 6 February 2022.