SANATORIUM MERKURIAL — MORPHINE RAUM / BERLIN

Sanatorium Merkurial returns to Morphine Raum in Berlin with a focused programme featuring Katarzyna Karpowicz and su dance110. Their work moves across acoustic instrumentation, electronic transformation, voice, body and spatial experience, reflecting some of the central concerns of Sanatorium Merkurial: ambiguity, transformation and affect.

Sanatorium Merkurial is a collaborative project developed by Sanatorium of Sound, the experimental music festival based in Sokołowsko / Poland, and Merkurial, the artistic collective founded by Robert Piotrowicz and Jacek Sienkiewicz. The programme brings together artists connected to both projects, whose practices emerge from different cultural, musical and geographical contexts. These highly individual artistic practices find common ground in the way they develop their own musical languages and address artistic challenges beyond the dominant narratives of the Western European avant-garde.

One of the central territories explored by Sanatorium Merkurial is the broad and often ambiguous space between contemporary abstract music and traditional music. Tradition is not treated as something to be reconstructed, preserved or simply reinterpreted. Its traces — rhythms, forms, modes of organising sound, cultural memory and individual genealogies — become material for entirely new creative gestures. The project draws attention to the ways in which contemporary abstract practices can carry echoes of different musical traditions without attempting to reproduce them.

Sanatorium Merkurial also places particular emphasis on the affective dimension of abstract music — on its capacity to operate through the body, intensity, tension and the relationship between performer and audience. Through affect, music can move beyond the autonomy of its formal structures and acquire a different presence within social and political space, becoming at once a physical, cultural and social experience.