The pandemic has rendered many things we once took for granted fragile. Among them is the certainty that music holds spaces for us, where freedom, closeness, exuberance, and community are within reach. Few things have been made so ambiguous and unsettling by living with the virus as contact, encounter, and touch. For many the idea of contact is now associated with fear, anxiety, grief, the painful loss of closeness and exchange, or guilt. Some are overwhelmed by the amount of new communication and relationships as they move deeper into the digital realm, while others finally feel liberated from the burden of maintaining contacts at all. Throughout these different realities, the inequality-reinforcing effect of the pandemic becomes apparent, because reducing contact might not be something one can afford, and its ramifications depend directly on their respective social status and economic resources.

One of the most important things that music and a music festival like CTM can bring about is contact, encounter, and touch: between people and communities, their different experiences and perspectives – between themes, practices, and methods; between genres, disciplines, forms of perception, ways of thinking, and fields of knowledge; between scenes and places, their stories, and realities. Bodies, spaces, sounds, and music are the foremost media for this. Their interplay is tactile and affective, touching us emotionally as well as physically and enabling resonance as a form of connection of its own. Music is a social practice, a means of communication, and a festival provides space for this.

As the social functions of music and festivals have been weakened, damaged, pushed into the digital, and partially made impossible – and as we grapple with a multiplicity of waves, modalities, uncertainties, and meanings of »reopening« – we should highlight the importance of creating space for many forms of contact, and reflect on their requirements. Contact has become woven into broader conversations around morality, perceptions of liberty, and agency. It suggests closeness, but the necessity of contact inevitably reflects its opposite: distance, ignorance of each other, and the gap that lies between »own« and »other.« Contact and touch are all too often abusive and hurtful, expressing inequality and reproducing power constellations. The decisive factor is therefore always the »how« of contact. What is needed is sensitivity, respect, empathy, and the willingness to learn.

Today more than ever, we need to establish positively transformative modes of contact with other realities beyond our own. And not only between people with different ways of life, in different parts of the world, or between generations, but also with our planetary environment and the diversity of its life forms, which are currently deprived of the basis of their existence at an alarming rate.

With its 2022 edition, CTM Festival will focus on questions and practices of contact, encounter, and touch. How can we bring back, rethink, re-experience, and strengthen music and its spaces of possibility for exchange and emotional resonance? Because without new and challenging forms of contact in the present, we cannot expect a better, more collective, just, and joyful future.