While on the way to Berlin, time-bending, going in and outside of the grid, we [the writers] started to question historicity through the legacy of Iannis Xenakis’s prolific practice and the main theme of this year’s special Berlin Atonal X100. Can time be changed? One hundred years after the celebrated composer’s birth, we physically face memories from ten years back. Entirely enchanted, longing for attunement, but ruthlessly left in the space in between, even though we had not arrived on site on time, we embodied the event fully from the start, way before it was advertised anyway. Then, last minute and just on time, repeatedly encountering a different rhythm of life than what we knew, in the multiplicity of directions scattered through sonic signals around the eight-channel speakers, we were welcomed by the curatorial team at Kraftwerk.

And the question was: is there a formula to transcript the embodiment of a human experience? It is easy to think so as Xenakis managed to create art by manipulating technology and mathematics. However, even if art appears to be submitted to subjective interpretations, the narrative of it is often told from a patriarchal perspective. Out of sync in this hierarchical society, we ended up for the first day in Misfit, a misplaced bar in the middle of the city, lost in the mesh of moments stochastically sourced in different temporalities. But our Misfits’ bones are there to shake all those assumptions of how we should receive art. Art is not about intellectualisation but about the present moment of how the body reacts to a performance regarding its own corporal archives. It is where and when phenomenology crosses with our somatheque self (this term coined by P. B. Preciado implies that the body is a political and cultural record). And here is the presumptuous intelligentsia rooted in the elitist background! Enough of this self-sufficiency, and let’s speak the truth of our living Atonal.

There is something absolutely relieving about releasing the crushing pressure of an aggressive Powell’s ƒolder and taking the Gamble that the journey could regain an expandable joy through our senses. Stepping aside is all it sometimes takes—stepping into an interstice that wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. And in this different spatiality, however, anchored in the same temporality, the whole Atonal experience finally came together from a misfit place in the capital’s centre by going through the sensorial arborescence guided by Xenakis’s work to a final Tresor place. The outsiders brought us on an exploration out of the expected paths designed by the festival.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.