UM Festival
The UM Festival for contemporary art, music and literature takes place every two years in the Uckermark, around the villages of Fergitz, Pinnow and Sternhagen Gut. The aim of the UM Festival is to revitalize one of Germany’s most beautiful yet structurally weak regions through an art event and to draw attention to it. The program is diverse – it gives artists the opportunity to work in this unique environment, while at the same time making the Uckermark itself accessible as a distinctive cultural landscape for everyone.
The Uckermark in the northeast of Berlin is not only a popular destination but has also become home to many Berlin-based artists and cultural workers. In 2007, some of them came together to found the nonprofit association Freunde der Uckermark, in order to foster exchange between city and countryside. Out of this civic engagement, the UM Festival was launched in 2008. Every two years, contemporary artists are invited to engage with the region and its inhabitants over a period of several months. The artists reflect on spatial, social and historical conditions on site and incorporate them into their works. We provide the artists with the opportunity to present their works beyond traditional exhibition spaces. Our exhibition venues are fields, forests, lakes, abandoned farmyards or other unusual places, where the works emerge and are placed in direct relation to their context.
The highlight is the three-day festival: alongside the presentation of site-specific artistic works, musicians and authors are also invited to present their current productions. By staging the program across various locations in the rural landscape, the UM Festival seeks not only to make the arts visible but also to showcase the beauty and diversity of the region and to encourage people to stay – also in the long term.
An invited curator selects the visual artists. Gudrun Gut curates the music section, and Ute Koenig curates literature. Today, the festival attracts more than 1,000 visitors and has become an important cultural event in Brandenburg. The Saturday evening celebration is a central highlight, bringing together artists and cultural practitioners from Brandenburg and Berlin with contemporary music.
The initiative Freunde der Uckermark e.V. aims to initiate measures for the structural development of culture in this region. The festival is one of these measures and is carried out in close partnership with and involvement of regional partners.
In order to involve young people from the region in the art project, a cooperation agreement was signed with the Aktive Naturschule Prenzlau, and in 2016 a student contribution was presented for the first time at the UM Festival.
Since 2019, the Freunde der Uckermark association has maintained a cooperation with the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNE Eberswalde), in order to support artistic productions that engage with scientific and ecological topics.