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BONE—21

De—Hybernation
Club x Performance Festival

It will be loud and airy, hot and distant at this year’s BONE Festival. DE—HYBERNATION brings telephone massages, body operas, sound installations, club nights and drone-metal performances to the Grosse Halle in the Reitschule Bern and to your home. Against the torpor and yet aware of the ongoing pandemic, the program DE—HYBERNATION, curated by Thea Reifler, Philipp Bergmann and San Keller, creates spaces between performance, sound art and club culture. The lineup combines artistic positions that have received little or no public attention, projects that renegotiate physical distance, intimacy and intensity during and after the pandemic. For three days and nights the public can immerse themselves between the world premiere and the well-known. In DE—HYBERNATION the audience will closely experience and maybe lose themselves.
While stages, museums and clubs closed during the lockdown, many new formats emerged. Alongside formats which «just» replaced live shows, many artists used the pandemic as a re-set to launch new interdisciplinary projects or redirect their interest to new content creating projects as diverse as the reactions to the pandemic itself.
DE—HYBERNATION has been looking for these works and has found them. Now, in Bern, in the deceptive glow of a hoped-for end to the pandemic, they are presented, unfolding their political momentum, as central today as it was at the beginning of the pandemic.

Just a few months ago, we faced the question: How should we plan a festival dedicated to both intensity and mindfulness? How to come together, sweat, breathe, and still be aware that this attitude also produces exclusions? Artists have responded intensively to this field of tension since the pandemic and offered answers to such questions. They showed that we could experience art from different distances — in a shared space or at home.

DE—HYBERNATION presents performances, DJ sets by local acts, concerts, video and sound works. The three-hour drone-metal performance DOOM by Layton Lachman lets guitar sounds set your teeth on edge. The performative club format Archipelagogo Club, initiated in geneva, recalls the history of the club as a refuge for queer people of color and cultural space for diverse artistic practices while looking to a possible sci-fi future. The performances black milk by tiran, Orientalia by Ceylan Öztrük, Nxs Fuimxs by Tamara Alegre, and (Black) Ribbon Dance by Frédéric Gies link club culture and performance to political questions about bodies and identity. Phone Massage by Tyra Wigg, the video works by Titilayo Adebayo as well as Paloma Ayala/Jeanne Jacob/Riikka Tauriainen or Body Opera and Symphony 3 by Wojtek Blecharz seek physical closeness in distance. In the Grosse Halle they create moments of loneliness and at the same time enter the living rooms of the Bernese audience that cannot attend the festival — be it as voice, stream or with dozens of wireless speakers.
BONE—21, an anchor point for all who want to experience what has remained artistically hidden in the last year, to dive in and descend not into the torpor, but into the bass, the cosmos of thought and the vibrations of DE—HYBERNATION.

About BONE

BONE Performance Festival, an annually established platform and meeting point for the national and international performance scene. It connects local institutions and artists of different backgrounds, professionals of the cultural landscape with a diverse audience. It has been an integral part of cultural life in Bern since 1998 and has presented formats that are constantly evolving and changing according to current focuses and concerns.

This year San Keller, Thea Reifler, Philipp Bergmann and Marina Porobic are responsible for the organization of the festival.