08/10/19
Power Night: the Launch of E-Werk Luckenwalde
E-Werk Luckenwalde, Brandenburg, Germany
14 September 2019
If you want to ensure that the launch of a new arts centre goes with a bang, who better to invite to curate the opening night’s programme than the now veteran London-based international performance art festival and commissioning body Block Universe? Founded in 2015 by Louise O’Kelly, the all-woman team, which now includes Katharina Worf, Xica Aires and Tatjana Damm, is celebrating its fifth year of programming, and, following a successful fifth edition of the annual festival in London in May, and the first performance festival as part of the Venice Biennale, 14 September saw the already-international team take its cutting-edge mixture of contemporary visual art, dance and music to the seemingly peculiar location of Luckenwalde, a small town 30 miles south of Berlin, in the middle of rural Brandenburg, in the former East Germany. The occasion was the launch of E-Werk Luckenwalde, a new arts centre, sited in a former coal power station, acquired in 2017 by Pablo Wendel, the CEO of Performance Electrics, a not-for-profit energy provider he established in 2012. The conceptual art and energy outfit produces and supplies what Wendel terms “Kunststrom” (or “art electricity” – produced through art installations, sculptures, performances and interventions, which employ renewable energy technologies).
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