3hd 2025: Vertigo

3hd presents “Vertigo”—a five-day interdisciplinary program running from October 1 to 5 and exploring disorientation as both a critical juncture and a creative force.The eleventh edition of the festival examines how contemporary instability—political, environmental, somatic—generates new forms of sensing, relating, and imagining care. Organized by Berlin-based platform Creamcake, spans multiple venues across the German capital, and features artists, performers, and thinkers whose work engages with fragmentation, precarity, and transformation through performance, moving image, sound, and embodied practice. 

In a moment defined by collective vertigo, the festival asks how disequilibrium might function as a strategy rather than merely a symptom. Through performances and workshops; a film screening, an exhibition, and a club night, 3hd 2025: “Vertigo” creates space for processing uncertainty while building alternative frameworks for stability and support. At Haus der Visionäre, the “Heavy Rotation” group exhibition presents works by artists that include Romeo Roxman Gatt and Emily Barker to investigate the conceptual tension between weight and movement, stillness and acceleration. The show opens with a durational performance by Joshua Woolford with Sippin' T and Lie Ning titled Dancing with the devil / a symphony of organs scattered over the floor, a three-hour exploration of collapse and care through sound, movement, and repetition. The venue also hosts the “Regulation Loop” on October 4, a club night featuring creo en todo, DJ Paypal, softchaos, Tati au Miel, and others. Closing 3hd will be “Care Circuit,” which also takes place at Haus der Visionäre and examines collective frameworks of (self-)compassion with the collaborative projects of Kate Williams and Reed Rushes’s Star & Stan and Ludwig Wandinger and Yves B Golden’s band called Mug.

HAU Hebbel am Ufer hosts the “Shifting Ground” performance program, which includes Johanna Hedva’s debut collaboration with opera director George R. Miller—featuring songs performed from the writer, artist, and musician’s unreleased album Fist—and Lewis Walker’s “MOVE HYPNO” movement workshop collaboration with hypnotherapist Michele Occelli. Meanwhile, the runtime of the ‘‘Hostile Atmospheres” moving-image program exploring sickness, trauma, and structural violence through the compromised body at Berlinische Galerie and 3hdTV will extend beyond the festival to November 3.


Highlights from this year’s 3hd 2025: Vertigo

“Regulation Loop” at Haus der Visionäre

Creamcake’s infamous club takeover transforms the dancefloor into a loop of rhythm, motion, and breath—a site of stability in a chaotic world. With a genre-bending roster, the night features Bianca Scout, who blurs the line between concert and ceremony with droning vocals with ritual movement, while Tati au Miel’s sonic spaces are built on abstraction and Afro-diasporic storytelling. ROSA PISTOLA, softchaos, Total XTC, creo en todo and DJ Paypal also perform.

“Heavy Rotation” at Haus der Visionäre

The group show takes its title from radio jargon and inverts it, exploring the productive tension between mass and momentum. Zuzanna Czebatul’s monumental party drug sculptures float between collective ecstasy and capitalist excess, while Romeo Roxman Gatt’s iron butterflies mediate queer fragility through industrial materials. Tirdad Hashemi & Soufia Erfanian offer intimate paintings documenting care within systemic pressure, and Johannes Büttner brings techno-mystical healing into conspiratorial absurdity. Emily Barker’s video work is informed by chronic illness and disability. The show opens with a durational performance by Joshua Woolford with Sippin' T and Lie Ning.

“Shifting Ground” at HAU Hebbel Am Ufer

Over two evenings, two body-oriented works explore disorientation as a productive force rather than a mere symptom. Lewis Walker’s Bornsick dissects inherited conditioning through gymnastics and dance, exposing the tension between conformity and the possibility of unlearning embedded patterns. The work uses athletic discipline as a framework for investigating how trauma and social expectations become inscribed in physical gesture. On Saturday, Walker presents “Bornsick” again, preceded by MOVE HYPNO—a workshop co-created with hypnotherapist Michele Occelli that guides audiences through altered states using music, movement, and hypnosis as tools for bodily transformation and collective healing.

Johanna Hedva debuts material from their forthcoming album Fist in a theatrical piece staged by opera director George R. Miller. The performance conjures grief, rage, and muddy queer desire in a ghostly ritual that transforms the stage into a space of spectral encounter—perhaps the afterlife itself. White feathers, black goo, and an overturned mattress become icons of psychic rupture. Written on a haunted guitar that vanished for a decade and returned mysteriously, the songs draw from “dominatrix blues,” “bog-witch lullabies,” and “succubus folk.”

“Nausea” at Haus der Visionäre

The performance event channels Sartre’s existential crisis, exploring the collapse of meaning and the radical freedom it exposes. Caner Teker’s KIRKPINAR reimagines Turkish oil wrestling as an intimate ritual, while Kinlaw’s gut ccheck confronts bodily overload and resistance. Sippin’ T navigates memory, identity, and displacement through sound and space-making. Zein Majali maps digital disorientation and narrative collapse in geopolitical contexts.

About Creamcake

Creamcake (CC) is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary platform, navigating the point of convergence in electronic music, contemporary art, and digital technologies. Distanced from normative social structures, it operates in fluid processes of thought and action, engaging with the social issues of the present through diverse projects. CC organizes exhibitions, performances, concerts, symposia, DJ sets, digital commissions, publishing projects, and workshops. These include the annual 3hd festival, Is it cold in the water?, Paradise Found, インフラ INFRA, Europool, <Interrupted = “Cyfem and Queer>, and the Chronologies of Creamcake anthology, among many others. As a queer-feminist nomadic space, CC has collaborated with a variety of clubs, community spaces, and institutions, including—but not limited to—Berghain, Berlinische Galerie, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Klosterruine, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, OHM, RSO, and Südblock.

Participating artists: Bianca Scout, Billy Klotsa, caner teker, creo en todo, DJ Paypal, Emily Barker, Ewa Dziarnowska, Firpal, George R. Miller, Holly Márie Parnell, JJJJJerome Ellis, Johanna Hedva, Johannes Büttner, Joshua Woolford, Kinlaw, Lewis Walker, Michele Occelli, Mug (Ludwig Wandinger & Yves B Golden), Romeo Roxman Gatt, ROSA PISTOLA, Sippin' T, softchaos, Sophie Hoyle, Soufia Erfanian, Star & Stan (Kate Williams & Reed Rushes), Tati au Miel, Tirdad Hashemi, Total XTC, Zein Majali, Zuzanna Czebatul
Berlinische Galerie | HAU Hebbel am Ufer | Haus der Visionäre | 3hdTV

http://3hd-festival.com/

3hd 2025 is organized by Creamcake, and made possible with the support of the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion, and in cooperation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer.

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Graphic by Firpal Jawanda