Bianca Ludewig
Scholar of the IRTG from September 2019 to December 2019
“Contemporary avant-garde festivals. Cultural practices between art, music and technology in late capitalism”
Dissertation project
In various countries and cities since the 1990s, a new form of festivals hasemerged, which I investigate in my dissertation. The distinctiveness of these festivals lies in the presentation ofmusic together with other forms of art, - with media, technologies, and discourses. I call this type of curationtransmedial, because these urban festivals represent a spirit of the limit and the transgressiveexperimenting with various artistic practices and disciplines as well as discourses. In my long term field research, I have examined these festivals with ethnographicmethods , such as interviews and documented participation. The festivals are places of manifestation – fluid and fragile structures appear – scenes, urban environments, artistic practices, genres, organizations, and networks; but also processes such as eventization, festivalization, precarization, gentrification, cosmopolitanization, digitalization, or globalization. Due to the eventization of capital cities, festivals and events have been increasing in number and are forced to compete and organize yet even more spectacular events. This also helps to make the city more attractive for creatives, tourism and investors. This opens up a lot of issues and questions, some of which I try to answer.
Bianca Ludewig held a scholarship at the Collaborative Research Centre 1015 “Otium” from September 2019 to December 2019. During her time in Freiburg she focused on questions of urbanity and otium – are urban festivals spaces of possibilitybeyond economic interests and profit-oriented actions in the neo-liberal city? Bianca Ludewig is doing her PhD in European Ethnology at the University of Innsbruck (thesis advisor Ingo Schneider). Her research interests are pop music and pop culture, urban studies, festival research, gender, precarization, and ethnographic methods.