The UNSAFE+SOUNDS FESTIVAL will take place in Vienna between September 7th and 17th. Over 70 local and international artists will be performing at seven locations, including the Postsparkasse, Zacherlfabrik, the Flucc and newly used off-spaces. The festival focus in 2023 is on acts with a diasporic background. Several panel discussions are dedicated to the topic. With “Hope”, chief curator SHILLA STRELKA is also putting a motto of hope at the beginning of the festival edition – as belief in a community that has political power, as STRELKA says in the interview.
“Hope” is this year’s Festival theme by Unsafe+Sounds. What gives us hope right now?
Shilla Strelka: Hoping is not necessarily linked to the now, but is rather directed towards the future. It carries the future within itself. It is a complex category, close to belief as the third category next to thinking and feeling. It’s actually not that easy to hope for miracles, although the category of hoping borders on the spiritual. It is the wish and the belief that something will develop positively. But hoping can also be a political move. It can be linked to an action and draw attention to the possible – positive – change in a situation. I also place the word “hope” in the context of community, because community building is still at the heart of the festival. This time, too, I wanted to raise the question of the possibility of one or more communities. It is the hope for a “coming community” that becomes subjectified and thus gains political power. A community that carries transformative potential and demands change.
The postscript reads: “A Politics of Healing”. How does healing go with hope?
Shilla Strelka: Healing is preceded by injury. The word “politics” opens the context to the social order. It’s about healing wounds that society has inflicted on us. It can be many things, everyone will understand something different by it and I deliberately wanted to keep it open. But it’s also about an attitude that wants to give the world a chance for healing, which is simply considering this option. And the experience of community is healing per se.
Healing experiences have already been made with the U+S in recent years – in different places such as churches and clubs. Where is the festival taking place this time?
Shilla Strelka: The opening of the festival will take place in the AIL, the beautiful hall in the Alte Postsparkasse, an Otto Wagner building. The discussions will take place, among other places, in the Brunnenpassage – a central institution in Vienna when it comes to (post-)migrant discourses. Another place that we are redesigning is the Artspace Echo Correspondence in the 19th district. It is an auratic place, the former studio of the sculptor Wander Bertoni. This space is dedicated to artists with a migrant background who come to Vienna on residency and exhibit their work. Some of the events will again take place in the Zacherlfabrik, a very close-knit place, also in the 19th district. The club track then happens in the Flucc, in the Arena and in a newly opened, still nameless club on the Nußdorfer Gurtel, which we temporarily named Hope Retreat.
That’s seven locations where you’re hosting U+S – more than in all previous festival editions. Nevertheless, there is talk of a lack of club rooms in Vienna. How come?
With the exception of the Arena, Flucc and Hope Retreat, these are not clubs, but off-spaces and discussion spaces, so it must end by 10 p.m. at the latest, unless the police turn off before that. Due to noise complaints, the arena is currently not getting permission to program after 2 p.m. If you are also looking for real safer spaces for FLINTA people in Vienna, there are almost no club rooms that fully meet these requirements. A few who make the effort are fully booked on the weekends up to a year and a half in advance. You have to imagine this.
Does that mean that as an organizer you have to constantly look for new places in order to be able to organize events safely?
Photo Zacherl factory (c) Philippe Gerlach
Shilla Strelka: As a promoter and festival organizer, I have had numerous bad experiences with local clubs. In several cases, after confirmed deals and after contracts with the acts had been signed, appointments were canceled at short notice – simply because it is possible, knowing that we organizers have no way of reacting to it. There is no union behind us, no lobby. Sometimes the deals are also bold and the rents unaffordable. In addition to the fees and travel expenses of the artists, you have to cover thousands of euros in rent, maybe give up a share of your entrance fee and on top of that you have to pay the AKM fee yourself, as one of the most renowned clubs in the city handles.
What consequences does this have for culture in Vienna?.
Shilla Strelka: It is currently a profit-oriented, competitive sphere in which no codes of conduct seem to apply. This leads to power games like the ones I have experienced myself. But it can also lead to abuse of power and, in the worst case, assaults, as #TechnoMeToo has revealed. How can a cultural offer be created in such an atmosphere of distrust? A metropolis like Vienna should help to create safe spaces and affordable spaces for the independent scene in which culture can take place. We need solidarity spaces in which the supreme principle is not money, which regulates everything.
Let’s postpone this discussion and talk about the program. After all, your booking is not only considered diverse by Austrian festival standards.
Shilla Strelka: Yes, the festival aims to present the broad spectrum of contemporary electronic music and its experimental varieties, taking into account new music as well as progressive club culture. That has been central to me from the start. As heterogeneous as the languages may be. I want to identify common denominators between the different languages and approaches. There are shared rhythms and frequencies, intensities and atmospheres and, in the end, also shared attitudes. For example, I find it interesting to observe that underground and mainstream are getting closer and closer. I also pick up on this trend: Pop is allowed to clash with avant-garde.
Plakat “Unsafe+Sounds”
What are your priorities this year?
Shilla Strelka: I see networking and community building as the core of my curatorial work – regardless of whether it’s about bringing local and international or local artists together and with the audience. This year, numerous artists with a diasporic background are also involved. When people with similar life experiences and especially a shared experience of othering come together to share, it can be extremely empowering and healing. The festival would also like to participate in the existing efforts to form an Asian diaspora community in Vienna, to strengthen it and help it become more visible.
can you do this
Shilla Strelka: When anti-Asian racism became very noticeable during Corona and there were numerous attacks on people who read Asian, initiatives such as Mai Ling or Perillazine and the networking meetings organized by the journalist Vina Yun were launched. These collectives have initiated a lot in Vienna. I myself am Half-Asian and in contact with many activists in this and other diasporic communities. I’m constantly learning. At the same time I am happy about the cooperation with the Brunnenpassage, with which the central discussion about the “we” in the diaspora was developed. We ask about the possibilities for solidarity between different diasporic communities, because I think we should deal more with the post-colonial discourse. Also in the context of music. What sounds do we actually hear? What sounds are we trained to hear? What is taught at the universities? And what about the sounds from the Global South? Under the slogan “Decolonize the Dancefloor” I invited acts that feature sounds from very different parts of the world. Some of which bring together tradition and modernity to develop new languages. They are acts that negotiate their roots musically.
How politics and aesthetics can be thought together, you ask yourself longer. How are these intersections supposed to be possible at this festival?
Shilla Strelka: Nothing has to be made possible, that’s just the way it is. This becomes clear with every performance: All sounds are political. Aesthetics is political because art, and I include music in this – I never tire of emphasizing this – succeeds in breaking into our perception, which is ideologically shaped, ergo hegemonically deformed. The goal is to irritate our perception, to shift it, to break through borders, in whatever way. It’s political, it’s transforming.
Thank you for the talk!
Christopher Benkeser
The Unsafe+Sounds Festival takes place from September 7th to 17th in Vienna. All information can be found at:
Unsafe+Sounds Festival (Homepage)
Unsafe+Sounds Festival (Instagram)