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Two lectures by GEOFF STAHL
(in english) ************ "Growing Older" in the New Berlin:
Club Transmediale and Creative Life in the City In January 2009, the electronic arts and music festival, CTM
(formerly Club Transmediale), celebrated its tenth anniversary.
For the better part of a decade, this annual event has been a showcase
for contemporary electronic visual art and music (its subname is
Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Visual Arts), and has
contributed to the image of Berlin as a city dedicated to encouraging
creative ferment, further extending its longstanding legacy as a
crucible for musical and artistic experimentation. This talk
will use CTM as a case study suited to address aspects of what is
referred to as the city's "precariat," or LIMEs (a colloquial
term applied to Berliners, meaning "Less Income, More Experience").
This cohort of creative individuals is caught up in the nebulous
and tenuous, but an increasingly central, cultural economy in what
is (still) referred to as the "New Berlin," a term deployed
by city marketers, developers and others to brand the city as it
has evolved after 1989 and the reunification of East and West Berlin,
about which more will be said below (Strom, 2001; Till, 2005; Binder
and Niedermüller, 2006). In order to explore issues related
to this phenomenon, the first section of this talk will briefly
contextualize arts and culture festivals in the city, drawing on
recent work on cultural tourism and festival culture as a way of
exploring how events come to define urban culture within the confines
of a particular discursive and symbolic apparatus: the "event
city" (Richards and Williams, 2004; Evans, 2005). A discussion
of the similarities and differences between film festivals and music
festivals provides a framework to further consider the unique ways
in which CTM evolved, relying upon a series of interviews with the
founders/organizers, noting particularly the festival's social function
and value. More specifically, this talk will explore what it
means to be "grow older" in the context of the New Berlin.
This draws specifically on Pierre Bourdieu's (1993) use of the term,
which refers to the accumulation, deployment, and translation over
time of certain kinds of capital that can provide both the ballast
and cultural prestige needed to claim and maintain a privileged
place in a particular field of cultural production. The discretionary
use of cultural and social capital that makes this possible has
been dispersed through networks which have their roots firmly planted
in Berlin, which have also been extended to bring in festivals,
institutions and individuals from elsewhere. These networks do not
necessarily ameliorate the kinds of tensions addressed here; instead,
they embody a number of strategies that have lately been translated
into imperatives for the organisers of CTM as they and the festival
have "grown older." As will be argued here, the organizers
have adapted to the changes in Berlin pragmatically at the level
of infrastructure, entrenched as part of the city's vibrant club
culture and its art and music scenes, and discursively at the level
of how to imagine the intersection between themselves, the "New
Berlin" and CTM as a constellation of forces, ideas, images
and practices which is shifting, unstable, and secures no guarantees
for a creative life in Berlin other than the certainty of uncertainty.
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