Freunde von Freunden goes behind the scenes of one of Europe's best electronic music festivals

Berlin’s transmediale festival is the sort of event where one minute you’re enjoying a challenging lecture on vaporwave, the next you’re stood amid the sweat, techno and leather harnesses of the Berghain. The annual event and its sister festival CTM celebrate boundary-pushing electronic music and art, with a focus as much on the theoretical and academic sides as the Club Mate and vodka partying aspects. Freunde von Freunden recently visited transmediale’s artistic director Kristoffer Gansing ahead of the 2016 event’s opening this week.

While to us his home looks dreamy – all elegant minimalism and a sweet little toy car (Kristoffer has a kindergarten-aged son), its owner tells FvF’s Michael Silverberg that “home is not just one place. It’s a bit itinerant.” Born in Sweden, Kristoffer lived in Denmark before spending a lot of time in Berlin. This unsettled lifestyle and the long hours involved in organising a festival seem to have impacted his view of the world. “In [transmediale] 2015 we had a focus on work-life balance,” he says. “We didn’t address it in this straightforward way at the same time – ‘How do you manage your work-life balance?’ – but to the bigger perspective, talking about the gamification of work and things like this. This is something I struggled with in my life."

He continues: “I’m [also] anxious about a focus on ‘innovation’ in the instrumentalised, quantified sense, which is not really even innovation. For example, we are asked to fill out quantified results and goals of the festivals. Funders become more and more focused on this, and the culture seems to be more and more focused on delivering results that are measurable and effective.

“This neoliberalisation of the arts and culture scene, not only in a general, cultural-critique perspective, really is happening concretely in how projects are being funded and carried out. That makes me anxious to work in this field in the future.”