With Animals of Distinction, Fly Pan Am & United Visual Artists, Dorine Mokha & Elia Rediger, Dani Gal & Ghazi Barakat, Num, Frederic Gies, Karel van Laere, and many more.
CTM Festival pairs daring artistic content with with critical discussions, framing today’s sounds and music cultures within a shifting, hybrid global society. With “Liminal,” CTM 2020 focuses on transitional phases in which a familiar order is destabilized. Liminal phenomena and states place us in grey zones, between a past that is no longer valid and a future yet to come. The ambivalence encircling us in endless and uneasy transitions is everywhere. Be it climate change, post-democracy, social justice, renationalization and globalization, migration, hybridization, digitalization—all currently urgent disputes involve a negotiation or borders and thereby highlight the liminal nature of our present. In music, boundary-disturbing experiences and acts of transgression are perpetually re-negotiated. Yet they should not be blindly celebrated—rather, praise should be supplemented with critical evaluation. How do such experiences and practices affect political and cultural structures? Can transformative potential and the emergence of new ideas arise through liminal experiences? When do they merely serve to reinforce known hierarchies? Is it enough to practice forms of experimental politics in a liminal space that has to make do without tangible utopias? With Liminal, CTM 2020 throws itself into limbo in hopes of stimulating a critical discussion of our present and possible futures.
