Berlin Atonal Wants You to Sleep in Kraftwerk

This week, the first images from the Venice Biennale have begun circulating — among the most striking, a naked woman suspended upside down inside a giant bell, serving as its clapper, as part of Florentina Holzinger's Seaworld Venice at the Austrian Pavilion. While new to the wider world, many Berliners will have seen this before: that same bell featured at the annual experimental music festival Berlin Atonal in 2023, when Holzinger performed Étude for Church in the industrial vastness of Kraftwerk.

Since then, Berlin Atonal itself has become a biennale — a decision that speaks to the scale of what its curators are attempting, but one that leaves a gap in the calendar on alternate years. This year, the organisers' answer to that gap is The Infinite Now: a thirty-hour continuous programme at Kraftwerk running opening on May 15, during which visitors are invited not just to attend but to inhabit the space — arriving on the Friday, sleeping in the building if they choose, and moving through an unfolding lineup of music, installation and film at their own pace until Sunday.

To find out exactly what Berliners can expect, we spoke with curators Laurens von Oswald, Harry Glass and Adriano Rosselli about the thinking behind such an unusual format.

There's no Atonal this year, but The Infinite Now is a large-scale event in that tradition, also happening at Kraftwerk. How did this come together?