Art
Curator: Harald F. Theiss
Lena von Goedeke: Tipping Point, 2021
Ice, sediments, hemp rope
Swings are installed at certain locations as a visual metaphor. They expand the view of the landscape in the idea of “flying”. With boards made of ice, Lena von Goedecke refers to the landscape in the Uckermark that was once formed by glaciers. They are narratives about water, forms, properties and the influence of ice on us humans and the biosphere.
Born in Duisburg, Lena von Goedeke studied art history at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and fine art at the Kunstakademie Münster, the Kunstakademie Trondheim, Norway and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The landscape is the central motif in her work. Her personal experience of sometimes extreme landscapes on journeys and hikes plays a central role in the development of new works.
Hannah Hallermann: Agent, 2021
Interactive sculpture
The visitors become part of a scenario and are called upon to act – through the physical experience, awareness for change is activated and the environment is re-examined in an almost dystopian state. Hallermann’s work encourages active participation in design processes and reflection on the present.
Born in Nuremberg, Hannah Hallermann studied fine arts, art history and philosophy at the art academy “Villa Arson” in Nice, France, and later obtained her master’s degree at the Dresden University of Fine Arts. Her mostly sculptural works with a formally strong physical approach are thought-provoking individual webs of relationships within contemporary socially relevant questions between optimisation, optimism and economies.
Fabian Knecht: tba
His mostly temporary installations are interventions in reality. Knecht works with found situations and thus expands the general understanding of art. The landscape as grown and formed nature and part of a reality becomes a temporary artefact. In this way, he creates temporary images and at the same time an aesthetic experience that prompts reflection.
Born in Magdeburg, Fabian Knecht studied at the Berlin Universität der Künste and the California Institute of the Arts. In 2014 he was a master student of Olafur Eliasson, at whose Institut für Raumexperimente he studied from 2009 to 2014. With his works, which often appear abruptly in public space, Knecht breaks out of the exhibition context and into everyday life. He changes patterns of perception and action, violates concepts of art and power structures and questions social relations and norms through counter-images.
Antoina Low: Schattenornament, 2021
In the days of the LPG Morgenrot, up to two hundred slaughter bulls stood chained in the ruins of a former barn. Remnants of the past power structure are translated into an ornamental floor repeat. With historical reference, the site-specific installation thus critically reflects the relationship between humans and animals.
Born in Liverpool (UK), Antonia Low studied at the Kunstakademie Münster and Goldsmiths College London. Her research into hidden spaces and their everyday use leads to installations that take up large spaces. In her conceptual artistic practice, she uses the techniques of archaeology often with spatial interventions in which she exposes traces and thus activates forms of visibility, developing in this way a play between representation, function and identities. Through a density of different references, new perceptions of inside and outside, here and there, yesterday and today emerge at the sites.
Katinka Pilscheur: 08-2021-01
Flags by the wayside, cloth, wood and a carriage
The multi-part project is based on disappeared country roads in the region and their history(s). Through artistic markings in the landscape and the stories of a local, they are revived for the visitors on a journey with a horse-drawn carriage. The starting point is the artist’s house with its forms of stories from the present, which are already visible through artistic means and participation.
Born in Herdecke an der Ruhr, Katinka Pilscheur studied fine arts at the Berlin Universität der Künste with Prof. Rebecca Horn and Prof. Frank Badur. Her cross-media, mostly spatial works are aesthetic experiences for the audience in places and with familiar materials and objects that the artist finds by chance, collects and combines into new readymades. Her cross-spatial installations create architectures and landscapes that explore the boundaries of existing imagination but also transform them.
Michael Sailstorfer: No Light Berlin (grey), 2011/2021
Polyurethane, steel
The installation of grey ceramic light bulbs is updated and re-examined in the rural outdoor space. The existential meaning and function of light is reconfigured. Only at first glance does the all-familiar arrangement remind one of a playful string of lights and irritate in its materiality and composition. The otherwise colourful light fixtures have gone out.
Born in Veiden, Michael Sailstorfer studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich and at Goldsmith College, London University. His unusual sculptures in landscapes expand and question sculpture through partly temporary constructions. On multi-layered levels of meaning, the works made of all-gas objects open up associations with current socially relevant themes and conditions and make them sustainably readable.
Raul Walch: Korridore, 2021
In harmony with the existing natural situation, the artist develops a site-specific walk-in textile installation that is more gesture than intervention. A dialogue with the visitors begins via the physical access. Reflections and interactions take place simultaneously and on several levels, creating new forms of life in the landscape space, alliances from the inside to the outside and possibly pointing to a new order.
Born in Frankfurt a. Main, Paul Walch studied sculpture at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee and with Olafur Elliasson and at the Universität der Künste. The focus of his artistic practice is an unconventional examination of and preoccupation with social reality, in which the audience can become part of a performance. Walch’s playful actions are not limited to exploratory curiosity or observation, but are often ephemeral experiments and site-specific interventions with which he reacts in different places.
Andrea Winckler: Untitled (Vests), 2021
Nylon taffeta, viscose, voluminous fleece, reflective fabric, various sizes
Andrea Winkler’s textile arrangements seem like found objects from re-enacted scenarios. As a kind of witness, they are “collected” by her in order to locate stories via a hybrid aesthetic, to retell them or to reinvent them in the present. With her sculptural fabric collages, which are reminiscent of vigils, the artist questions our behaviour and relationship to ‘internal security’, climate, production, the environment and thus to social design processes. At the UM Festival, the specially made works enter into new connections with their surroundings outside the exhibition space for the first time.
Born in Zurich, Andrea Winckler studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg with Wolfgang Tillmans, Cerith Wyn Evans and Gisela Bullacher and later attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London. With her objet trouvé, the artist builds site-specific installations in which the physical experience plays an essential role. Associative spaces open up, sometimes evoking diffuse moods between absence, loss, but also fascination. On temporary stages, the audience is confronted with new perceptions and contexts.
Ulrich Wüst: Dorf. Die Gemeinde Nordwestuckermark, (2014-2018)
Archival Pigments Prints
The supposedly idealised landscape as deserted black-and-white photographs are seeming analyses and commentaries on German history and contemporary documents between private and public life – marked by upheavals and transformations not only in rural peripheral areas north of Berlin. With a cool documentary gaze and via an aesthetic of emptiness, Wüst explores a “cosmos of its very own charm”, as he himself describes his pictorial journey.
Born in Magdeburg, Ulrich Wüst studied at the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Weimar before moving to Berlin in 1972. He worked as an urban planner until 1977, then as a photo editor and from 1983 as a freelance photographer. In the mid-1980s he was one of the most important photographers in the GDR. Ulrich Wüst is a quiet observer of social and political upheavals of his time.
Music
Curator: Gudrun Gut
Albert Hofmann Soundsystem: Best of Hörstation
Martin Gretschmann came into the public eye in the early 90s under the pseudonym Console. Shortly afterwards, he became part of The Notwist and provided the electronic touch there. Under the solo project name Acid Pauli, he has produced several records, remixes, radio broadcasts and radio plays in recent years, the latter in collaboration with Andreas Ammer.
In addition to numerous collaborations, for example with Björk or the Philharmonic Orchestra Würzburg, Gretschmann is always finding new ways to express himself. For example, he took part in the unique project “The Golden Machine”. For this, an electronic device was specially developed that continuously produced a radio play on the novel of the century “Infinite Fun” by David Foster Wallace for an entire year. In 2020, the latest album “Acid Pauli: MOD” was released.
At the UM Festival, he will mix his sound files with audio texts as Albert Hofmann Soundsystem (in cooperation with literature curator Ute Koenig).
Donna Maya: Lost Spaces
and producer from Berlin. Donna Maya sees her music as a political contribution to social change and is committed to women’s rights, the rescue of refugees from the Mediterranean and a social system based on solidarity. She releases records and CDs, writes film music for Fatih Akin’s film “Kurz und schmerzlos”, composes turntable concerts for the Kammerphilharmonie, is a DJ and develops interdisciplinary performances, most recently for the ‘drei D poesie’ festival at the Uferstudios Berlin.
With her music, Donna Maya makes places and people audible that are often overheard. She records the soundscapes typical of these places and uses them as the basis for her compositions. With her theremin, Donna Maya tells abstract stories with electronically underpinned sound sculptures that inevitably create imaginary images in the listener. New album “Lost Spaces – Detroit”.
Ensemble Quillo: zuFußQultur
Ensemble Quillo was founded in 2004 with the aim of establishing special contemporary music projects in rural Brandenburg. These include Landqultour, the Quillo Workshop and zuFußQultur. In 2011, they were awarded the Regine Hildebrandt Prize. With Hof Quillo (Uckermark), the ensemble has also created a cultural hotspot that facilitates stimulating and diverse encounters with new music.
For the 7th UM Festival, Ensemble Quillo offers “zuFußQultur“, an encounter with contemporary music in nature at 7 different sections of the UMWege.
with:
Alexander Glücksmann (clarinet) plays Jörg Widmann: Fantasie (2011)
Julia Yoo Soon Gröning (violin) plays Hans Werner Henze: Ländler (1977)
Luise Rau (cello) plays Luciano Berio: Les mots sont allés (1979)
Daniel Göritz (guitar) plays Morton Feldman: The Possibility of a New Work (1966)
Max Renne (conductor) plays Dieter Schnebel: Nostalgie (Visible Music) (1962)
Lion Hinnrichs (piano) plays George Crumb: Dream Images (1972)
Ursula Weiler (piccolo) + Dominic Oelze (drum) Werner Heider: Gassenhauer (1984)
Lindred: Hyperdrama
Berlin-based American Lindred creates twisted Holy Pop, hyperemotional music with glittering melodies and elastic vocals, manifested in spirited choruses and disembodied voices of longing and almost otherworldly electronic atmospheres. The name is made up of Lindi and Dreda, a nexus that combines snake and beauty, despair and euphoria.
Recent performances also include the Sonic Ground Festival (Munich), the Hraničář Ústí nad Labem Cultural Centre (Czech Republic) and the Austin Museum of Human Achievement (USA).
Monika Werkstatt: Chillout
Monika Werkstatt has made a name for itself as an electronic improvisation forge in a short time and performs throughout Europe in ever new constellations. Monika Werkstatt is a collective of changing female artists and has a radical experimental approach.
The Festival Ambient Session led by Gudrun Gut unites the present musicians: Donna Maya, Pilocka Krach, Gudrun Gut, Lindred, Rachel Lyn and will open the Chillout in Fergitz on Sunday.
Euler/Mynther/Sprenger: Moon Machine – Die kybernetische Nachtigall
In their third joint project, visual artist Tobias Euler (Jonny Knüppel), composer Thies Mynther (Phantom Ghost) and theatre-maker Veit Sprenger (Showcase Beat Le Mot) found the Church of the Cybernetic Nightingale. To attract the extremely rare bird, they have built a complex mechatronic music machine with which they tirelessly tour towns and villages, supported by a troop of ravers, adepts, ornitholog:ists and other special people for whom their music is more than collateral damage.
Pilocka Krach: Auf dem Trecker
Pilocka Krach was born and raised in Berlin Mitte. Around 2000, she spent some time in Vienna and worked together with noisefreejazzer Philipp Quehenberger. In the course of Pilocka Krach’s DJ career, as a self-taught DJ, Pilocka Krach was and is celebrated for her authentic live shows in clubs and at festivals all over the world. Pilocka Krach is part of the Monika Werkstatt and runs her own label “greatest hits international”.
Pilocka played on the big stage at the last UM-FESTIVAL in Gerswalde and thrilled everyone very much. We are happy to have her back on the tractor.
Rachel Lyn: Modular Daydream
“Oh Daydream” is the debut album by the Australian-born, Berlin-based artist. Lyn is known for her work with modular synthesizers and is part of a performance trio called ‘3Ddancer Live’, which emerged from her Modular Gang event series. Live she takes the audience into fictional worlds. Lyn combines unusual motifs and translates imaginary subjects through her modular performance. Her debut live show was based on Andy Warhol’s famous friends and at her Modular Gang Party she did a cover of Delia Derbyshire’s 1964 lo-fi recording ‘Falling from The Dreams’, for which Lyn re-recorded Delia’s vocals and orchestrated her own improvisation of modular sounds around the voice.
At the UM Festival she plays three short modular live sets in alternation with Lindred in Fergitz at the Barn.
Teichmann + Söhne: Family Affair
Teichmann & Söhne is an unconventional family project that unites different generations, musical traditions and sound spaces. Equipped with a hodgepodge of wind, plucked and percussion instruments, as well as numerous electronic music machines, father Uli Teichmann and his sons Andi and Hannes enter a common playing field, eager to experiment and open to the opposite.
Here, electronics meets acoustics, the grooves and sounds of the sons meet the virtuosity of the father. A common sound cosmos that brings together the most diverse musical developments of the 20th century across generations: from electronica, jazz, krautrock, classical music to world music.
Thomas Fehlmann: Ambient mit Schuss
Thomas Fehlmann’s musical direction was decisively shaped by his work with the band ‘Palais Schaumburg’ in the eighties. Electronic, border-crossing and fun. To this day, he also acts as a player in the Berlin-Detroit Connection and was until recently a member of the British band ‘The Orb’. Fehlmann has released dozens of solo records, given concerts all over the world and composed various film soundtracks and releases on the Cologne label Kompakt. His most recent release is the LP ‘Böser Herbst’ in April 2021.
Gudrun Gut: Musik Kuratorin des Festivals
Gudrun Gut has been active in the Berlin music scene since 1979 and is part of various bands and projects (Mania D., Malaria!, Matador, Davies/Gut, Greie Gut Fraktion, Gut und Irmler, Monika Werkstatt, solo as Gudrun Gut), label maker (Monika und Moabit Musik), radio producer, together with Thomas Fehlmann “Ocean Club Radio” for Radio Eins Berlin (1997-2007) as well as festival curator (Marke B – Berliner Labelnächte, Um-Festival, Monika Werkstatt). In 2019 she received the ‘Listen to Berlin Award’ for promoting and developing the Berlin music scene.
Gudrun Gut lives and works in Berlin and in the Uckermark. New album 2021 “Gudrun Gut + Mabe Fratti: Let’s Talk About The Weather”.
Literature
Curator: Ute Koenig
Janine Adomeit: Vom Versuch, einen silbernen Aal zu fangen
The unpredictability of second chances
Tomorrow everything will be different or now it doesn’t matter. This is how the residents of the run-down Rhineland spa town of Villrath live. Since the local healing spring dried up years ago, the guest rooms have been empty. Then construction work unearths a mineral-rich trickle. What could bring back the splendour of bygone days if not good old medicinal water?
Janine Adomeit, born in Cologne in 1983, studied literature and linguistics. The novel “Vom Versuch, einen silbernen Aal zu fangen” is her debut.
Pierre Jarawan: Ein Lied für die Vermissten
In 2011, when the Arab Spring is in full swing, the discovery of two bodies also triggers the first unrest in Beirut. While houses are already burning, Amin writes down his memories: of 1994, when he returned to Lebanon as a teenager with his grandmother – twelve years after the death of his parents. Of his friendship with Jafar, the same age, with whom he roamed this secretive post-war world. And of how he had to painfully learn that there will never be certainty in this country – neither about his friend’s past, nor about the history of his family.
Pierre Jarawan is an author, playwright and freelance writer. He was born in 1985 to a Lebanese father and a German mother in Amman, Jordan, after they fled the civil war. He came to Germany with his family at the age of three. In 2012, he became the international German-language poetry slam champion. His debut novel “Am Ende bleiben die Zedern” (The Cedars Remain in the End) was published in 2016. The novel is now an international bestseller, translated into many languages. In spring 2020, his second novel “Ein Lied für die Vermissten” was published.
Caroline Rosales: Das Leben keiner Frau
Melanie’s fiftieth is a lavish party. She lets herself be celebrated, the champagne flows in streams, a flirtation is in the air. But then the tide turns. Her mother, with whom she never had a good relationship, needs her help, she has grown old. Her grown-up daughter, who never wanted to be like Mel herself, likes being a housewife and definitely doesn’t want a career. Yes, and the men. The flirt, a colleague, talks badly about her in the office. Mel’s boss promotes a younger colleague. Her ex-husband becomes a father and has a child with his new wife. The child he never wanted with her. Mel has done everything right in her life. Except for the things that went colossally wrong. And today she is just angry. A book about the pitfalls of emancipation and the curse of doing everything for the first time.
Caroline Rosales, born 1982 in Bonn, is the author of several non-fiction books and editor of ZEIT magazines at ZEIT ONLINE. In 2019, her autobiographical book “Sexually Available” was published, in which she wrote about growing up as a girl and being a woman in the mirror of everyday sex and abuse. The Life of No Woman is her literary debut. Rosales lives with her family in Berlin.
David Schalko: Bad Regina
Only a few people still live in Bad Regina, a once glamorous tourist resort in the mountains, staring at the ruins of their place and watching themselves idly disappear. For years, a mysterious Chinese named Chen has been buying up their houses for horrendous sums of money – only to let them fall into disrepair afterwards. When he also wants to buy the castle of the ancient local nobility, Othmar, the gout-ridden former operator of the most famous party club in the Alps, decides to find out what this Chen is all about and what he intends to do with Bad Regina. In the process, Othmar and the remaining inhabitants experience a nasty surprise.
David Schalko, born 1973 in Vienna, lives as an author and director in Vienna. He became known with revolutionary television formats such as “Sendung ohne Namen”. His films such as “Aufschneider” with Josef Hader and the series “Braunschlag” and “Altes Geld” have won numerous international awards. “Bad Regina” is his third novel.
In our recording, actor Bernd Jeschek lends his voice to one of the main characters of the novel – Othmar. Bernd Jeschek (* 14 January 1949 in Gaal, Steiermark) is an Austrian actor, director, screenwriter and musician. Bernd Jeschek has performed as a theatre actor at many theatres and has appeared in over 30 productions in film and television.
Tanja Schwarz: In neuem Licht
The women in these novel miniatures have experienced a lot and left a lot behind. They care for strangers, look after big children and old parents and almost lose themselves over it.
Tanja Schwarz tells of women from the liberal, often precarious bourgeoisie; their lives are difficult and fragile in the normal way. Political or private crises have awakened them from their saturated rigidity. Tanja Schwarz encircles her characters with sparse prose that nevertheless reaches to the core.
Tanja Schwarz was born in 1970 in Hechingen in Baden-Württemberg. She studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig and has received numerous awards. Her short story collection “Der nächtliche Skater” was published in 2001 and “Weltroman” in 2019. Schwarz lives with her family in Hamburg. Her short story collection “In neuem Licht”, from which she will read an excerpt at our festival (listening station), will be published by Hanserblau in September.
Iris Wolff: Die Unschärfe der Welt
Would Florentine and Hannes have opened their door to the two young travellers even if they had known what role the visit from the GDR would play in the lives of the Banater family? Would Samuel have stood by his best friend Oz wholeheartedly even if he had known the extent of his decision? In “Die Unschärfe der Welt”, the lives of seven people, seven elective relatives, are interconnected. Despite strokes of fate and spatial distances, they move incessantly towards each other. Thus, against the backdrop of the collapsing Eastern Bloc and the eventful history of the 20th century, a great novel about friendship and what we are willing to give up for the happiness of another is created. Artfully and with great precision, Iris Wolff explores the possibilities and limits of language and memory – and of those images that others make of us.
Iris Wolff was born in 1977 in Hermannstadt, Siebenbürgen. She spent her childhood in Banat before emigrating to Germany with her family in 1985. Later she studied German language and literature, religious studies as well as graphic arts and painting at the Philipps University in Marburg. Today she lives in Freiburg im Breisgau. From 2003 to 2013, she was an employee of the German Literature Archive in Marbach and a lecturer in art education. From November 2013 to March 2018, she was the coordinator of the Cultural Education Network in Freiburg.
Iris Wolff is a member of the International Exile P.E.N. and primarily writes short stories and novels. In 2012, she published her debut novel Halber Stein with Otto Müller Verlag. In 2020 she published “Die Unschärfe der Welt” with Klett-Cotta Verlag.