Runs:
25.–31.1.2027
Morphine Raum
Public Presentations:
26.1.2027 | 14:00
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Grüner Salon
Finale and Roundtable:
31.1.2027 | 14:00
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Grüner Salon
Free entry
The lab is designed as an open toolbox for artists exploring how to (re)connect to »the traditional.«, and is intended to help them navigate their practice outside of (self-)exoticisation and the uneven power dynamics created by mass-cultural and other stereotypes.
The artistic fellows – Anqi Liu, DJ Würm, Jasmine Tutum / Ntoutoume-Obame, Ken Ueno, KINDASA, Mauricio Velasierra, Shamica Ruddock – will be working during the festival week at radialsystem studios. They will present their current solo work in short, public presentations on Tuesday 26 January 2027, and share insights into some of the ideas, processes and conversations explored during the week at a roundtable discussion on the festival’s closing Sunday 1 January.
During CTM Festival week, numerous other concerts and inputs will also complement the lab’s theme – see our dedicated feature on the Resynthesising the Traditional thematic strand for more information.
Theme: At the Extreme
This year’s edition of the lab invites artists and researchers whose work critically examines the ethical, aesthetic, and political implications of traditions entangled with ideas, embodiments, representations, experiences, and sensoriums of extremity. These may include intensity, transgression, transformation, marginality, outsiderness, endurance, conflict, and excess.
While such encounters are often understood through associations with noise, violence, and loud popular music, the lab invites theoretical and practical reflections on how the extreme emerges beyond these tropes – for example pointing beyond typical masculine codings of the extreme, reformulated by current queer and feminist reframing of the concept. Drawing on the related meanings of the Greek exo and Latin extra (“outside” or “external”), we approach extremity as a relational condition, chosen or imposed, produced between majoritarian centres and their minoritarian outsides, respectively between joyful, novel, and transformative potentials surrounding the extreme, and pitfalls such as rigidity, intolerance, and polarisation.
What is considered extreme, by whom, and why? What does it mean to follow a tradition to its extreme consequences, and what might those be? Who is allowed to push tradition to its limits, and whose practices are framed as inauthentic or dangerous? What does it mean to practise tradition under pressures such as war, displacement, repression, or ecological crisis? How might traditions provide ways of inhabiting extreme times, and how might extremity enable or obstruct alliances?