Under the title DISPLACED 2015 the Schlachten – Contemporary Arts Festival takes place in the region of Fläming, south of Berlin, over several weekends in June and July 2015.

This year the annual contemporary arts festival focuses on the issue of Displacement: be it geographical displacement – the migration and dislocation of persons – or cultural displacement; as a result of conflict, economic pressures, the effects of environmental degradation, of globalisation, through increased freedom of movement and an increasingly interconnected world.

2015 marks the 70 year anniversary of the end of WW II, a period of mass displacement of persons around the globe. The estimated figure of over 50 million Displaced Persons worldwide, in the years following the war, has been surpassed this past year for the first time, making it a topmost European and worldwide concern, closely linked to political, economic, and not least, environmental factors. The mass displacements and expulsions of the past are still reverberating today, as those who are displaced displace and the unsettled unsettle, in a chain of events that has yet to run its course.

Our festival is held in a region that has known many millions of Displaced Persons throughout the centuries: displaced by the bloody religious conflicts that decimated Europe, and which began here; displaced by the emergence of new nation-states, the redrawing of borders in the explosion of WW I, and in the resulting hunger years; displaced during the huge upheavals of National Socialism and WW II, with its death marches and lost armies, and in the mass relocations following the war.

This local history of Displacement is our link to Syria and to Sudan, to the Indians of the Amazon displaced as their homeland forests are being destroyed, to the millions of Chinese migrating into megacities, and to France of the Front National; to all who are displaced from their homes, who are displaced within their homeland, and those affected by Displacement.

DISPLACED 2015 offers a platform and an opportunity for artists, performers, thinkers and audiences to engage with and highlight the important issue of Displacement, as reflected in our local, personal and global contexts: as a physical, temporal, cultural, and psychological experience of dislocation, the sense of being uprooted, of unfamiliarity, uncertainty, instability and insecurity.

The exhibition titled DISPLACED 2015  by international artists is accompanied by musical performances, workshops, guided tours and video screenings. Find the full programme here: http://schlachten.org

DISPLACED 2015 ARTISTS

Khaled Al-boushi, Chris Avis, Angiola Bonanni, Walter van Broekhuizen, Colette / Laboratoire Lumiere, Sebastian David, Mimouni El Houssaine, Anna Gimein, Isabella Gresser, Ursula Heermann-Jensen, David Iselin-Ricketts, The Logothetis Ensemble, The Maharaj Trio, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke, Said Messari, Miguel Mothes, Salva Nebot, Dorota Nieznalska, Christa Panzner, Sharon Paz, Peschken / Pisarsky (Urban Art), Emily Pütter, Iva Radivojevic, Refugees KM, Julia Schmid, theater 89, Khadija Tnana, Milos Tzare, Johanna Speidel & Chus López Vidal, Gisela Weimann, Harry van der Woud

About SCHLACHTEN Festival:

Battles and the fields of battle – conflict, its causes and repercussions – form the central theme of SCHLACHTEN annual international contemporary arts festival. Situated in rural Fläming, in the shadow of the great city of Berlin, SCHLACHTEN explores this theme of conflict on all levels, each year from a new perspective. Here, between the towns of Wittenberg and Jüterbog, lay 500 years ago the axis of Luther and Tetzel: the two bitter adversaries and protagonists of the great ideological power-struggle of the Reformation, its wars, schisms and mass displacements. It is an epicenter of thesis-antithesis and conflict; an example of far-ranging concerns impacting locally and local conflict reverberating across the globe. In these forsaken battlefields steeped in the history of bloody religious conflict, of Napoleonic imperial conquest, WW2 nationalism and its aftermath, and the cold aggression of East-West confrontation, we bore deeply into the substrata of conflict, wishing to expose its many underlying and overlying layers. SCHLACHTEN is an opportunity for artists and audiences to explore these issues in depth. We work across divisions, including all forms of artistic expression: music, literature, dance, re-enactments, new media, painting, film, sculpture, culinary art, and any resulting hybrids – to transform these important concerns into something visible, tangible, audible, even tasteable.

http://schlachten.org