In 2025, the transdisciplinary festival shut up and listen! celebrates its twentieth anniversary with an especially extensive jubilee edition. Under the artistic direction of composer and curator Belma Bešlić-Gál, and under the title PAST_20 → NEXT_∞, a cross-border fabric unfolds between archive and speculation, memory and yet-unheard spaces of possibility. Once again, the festival transcends the character of a mere concert series and serves as a resonance space in time, unfolding both backward and forward. Alongside the established venue echoraum, the festival will also take place in 2025 at the listening gallery SP•CE—an addition to be understood not only as a physical expansion, but also as a conceptual extension. Since the Covid pandemic, a large part of the performative contributions has been presented both via livestreaming and in the tried-and-true format of collective experience on site.

Over nine festival days, sual! 2025 combines concerts, performances, audiovisual works, sound installations, and exhibition contributions into an open structure in which historical positions and new works not only enter into dialogue but also challenge each other. With the media archive SUAL ARCHIVES #20, interdisciplinary diversity is documented through selected artistic contributions from 20 festival editions.

sual! 2025 features twelve performative contributions, including numerous premieres, new works by Petra Sandner, an installation by Kolektiv ПРОСТОРЪ, and discursive formats. In the listening gallery SP•CE, a multi-channel listening space and a comprehensive media archive with contributions from 20 years of the festival will be presented, along with a newly created quadraphonic sound installation by Berlin composer-performer Kai Fagaschinski, developed within the artistic research project AUDIO GHOSTS.

The musical program expands the notion of composition towards processual, intermedial, and auditory-theatrical formats. The opening at echoraum brings together works by Gertrude Moser-Wagner | Ulrich Kaufman, and Radu Malfatti, while the ensemble Zimt (extended) featuring Franz Hautzinger creates sonic structures that oscillate between reduction, micro-interventions, and density. The second festival day is dedicated to current developments in the post-Yugoslav space, featuring an electroacoustic performance by Svetlana Maraš, a lecture by Damjan Jovičin on sound and social engagement in Belgrade, as well as a collective sound action by the formation metacounterpoint. The festival continues with a sound projection by noid, along with performances by Ensemble echo_von_nichts and Manuel Pessoa de Lima, exploring the boundaries of sound, language, and body as semiotic carrier structures.

With the move into the listening gallery SP•CE, the focus shifts from performance to site-specific sound research. In addition to Kai Fagaschinski’s premiere of a sound installation for a virtual clarinet quartet, the multi-channel listening space SHUT UP AND LISTEN! 2006–2025 forms an immersive acoustic topology of the festival’s history.

shut up and listen! 2025 is not a retrospective look back, but rather a dynamic reconstruction of temporality through sound. This festival understands itself not as a concluded edition, but as an open resonance structure across time.

Belma Bešlić-Gál, artistic direction