Nordwind Festival: Soft Utopia

The conceptual work on NORDWIND began in the middle of the post-pandemic period. A demand for accessibility, as well as the importance of solidarity, caution and consideration and the need for softness have accompanied and shaped the working process. For the first time, festival curator Ricarda Ciontos worked with an international team of artists, curators, activists and thinkers (Duduzile Mathonsi, Vanasay Khamphommala, Carolin Jüngst, Lars Werner Thomsen and Sindri Runudde) who have shaped the programme both with their own artistic stage productions, and with their respective expertise and perspectives and have turned it into a carefully composed overall concept that makes identity politics, awareness of the importance of alliances, and international solidarity a lived practice. The festival focuses on perspectives of Black and BIPoC, disabled and non-disabled people and those of representatives* of the LGBTQIA+ scene that challenge and transform the hegemonic view of performance. The title “Soft Utopia” stands on the one hand for demands for change in terms of interpretative sovereignties, power structures and structural intersectional discrimination, and on the other hand for the strategy of softness with which these changes are approached persistently and sustainably in the way that may be necessary.

Funded by: Bundesbeauftragte für Kultur und Medien, Fonds Darstellende Künste / NEUSTART KULTUR #TakePlace, Danish Arts Council / Statens kunstråd, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Institut Français, Kulturbehörde Hamburg, Konstnärsnämnden / The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and Bündnis internationaler Produktionshäuser.