TIES is a Berlin-based event series by Borshch magazine’s Mariana Berezovka and TYME. It celebrates the resilience of the city’s music communities and diasporas affected by political oppression, war, and inequality through music performances and workshops at Kantine am Berghain (27.10), GIRI (7.11 and 6.12), Arkaoda (9.12) and Good Clay Sunshine (20.12).
We use the word ‘solidarity’ a lot, but often we don’t know each other’s stories, and this needs to change. TIES underscores Berlin's legacy as a refuge for artists, aiming to create cultural bridges between musicians and cultural activists from diverse backgrounds. Together, we will work towards inclusivity, visibility, and the true essence of diversity, despite the daily obstacles to being heard and accepted.
Program
October 27th
19:15 Alie
21:15 undo despot live
22:15 CEM live
23:15 Heinali live
For our first TIES event, we invited artists who represent different communities and hold strong positions in their creative work. During this night, we wanted not only to create a diverse lineup but also to bring audiences together and remind ourselves why we engage with our communities and what the greater purpose is of having the opportunity to come together to listen to music and each other.
November 7th
18:00 Community Building Workshop
19:30 Networking & Drinks
This practical workshop explores community building through creative means and finding ways to create more inclusive spaces. Participants will learn about effective ways to foster inclusivity, the essential components of a strong community, and how to build one overcoming language barriers through music and the arts.
December 6th
Program
Workshop "Common Unity in Displacement" with Qusay Awad and Mariana Berezovska
This hands-on workshop will delve into the specifics and challenges of cultivating and participating in cultural collectives and communities while navigating displacement or exile.
December 9th
23:00 Nastya Vogan
00:30 ABADIR
02:00 Nídia
04:00 Qكيو
Our second TIES night features artists authentically representing diverse global voices, diasporic communities, and cultural richness. We’ve invited musicians who genuinely stand for their communities and share a profound musical connection, with this lineup truly celebrating music and originis, and going beyond ‚diversity‘ checkboxes.
Their work critically examines roots in their home communities — Lisbon, Kyiv, Cairo, and Syria — meeting in Berlin and echoing sounds that have traveled like genes carried by people on their long journeys away from home.
December 20th
Pottery Workshop with Tina Deli from Odesa to Berlin
For our final TIES event of the year, we are collaborating with Tina Deli, the co-founder of a pottery studio “Pottery makes me feel good“ in Odesa. Tina's studio operates as a non-profit meeting point and a place of healing since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Odesa is one of the cities in Ukraine under constant shelling, and it is significant for us that Tina brings her symbolic experience from Odesa to Berlin. In this workshop, Tina will not only teach pottery but also share her experiences of running a solidarity hub and the art of holding together the unbreakable pieces to feel connected and unified.
Artists
Alie
DJ
Alie is a Berlin-based artist, music producer and DJ. She is co-founder of the sound portal awa awa, part of the dance music group nlbs and releases fast paced trance music under the alias extra dimensional. Her artistic practice is concerned with the subtleties of sensory perception and its interplay with the body. When DJing, she creates an oscillating flow between ambient, experimental and fast-forward sounds.
undo despot
LIVE
undo despot is an experimental audio-visual artist from Odesa. Her musical practice is focused on deconstructed structures with a strong influence of industrial, coupled with academix strings mixed with noise. At the same time she’s most known as a live artist, who combines various genre influences.
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CEM
LIVE
Known for their meteoric rise alongside the notorious Herrensauna party, CEM is a breakout sound artist and musician who’s pioneering experimental atmospherics and compositions.
The Berlin-based artist is forging their namesake as a tour de force in crafting visceral and uncanny sound artworks that intend to explore sonic landscapes creating a field of hallucinations that reach and aim to stimulate the psyche, even at its most delirious state. Some of their most recent works include “Music For Spaces”, a compilation of sound works extracted from ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations with artist Mauro Ventura and their latest live show “At the Gates” performed at Volksbühne, Berlin
Heinali
LIVE
Oleh Shpudeiko is a music composer and sound artist who records as Heinali.
Oleh performs live on a modular synthesiser, an instrument that he sets up informed by artistic research that enables him to improvise polyphony and monophony, borrowing techniques and ideas from medieval composers & theorists and contemporary fields of analogue synthesis & generative music. His Organa live set explores the intersection between technology and the sacred, the Providence and Contingency, and is loosely based on the XII-XIII century polyphony of the Notre Dame school and the monophony of Hildegard von Bingen.
Nastya Vogan
DJ
Nastya Vogan is a Kyiv-based electronic producer and composer, a resident of #. With a background in classical music, she opens up an electronic space to channel different influences from rare leftfield techno, electro and breakbeat to innovative electro-acoustic performances with an orchestra.
Nídia
DJ
Nídia is an internationally acclaimed Afro-Portuguese electronic producer and DJ, based out of Vale da Amoreira, south bank of River Tagus, across from Lisbon. As part of the Príncipe Discos record label and artistic collective, she has been having a decisive role, both as an individual artist and as within the community, in bringing inspiringly progressive aesthetics and ethics to the contemporary alternative dance infrastructure across the globe, and the kuduro culture in particular.
ABADIR
DJ
ABADIR (Rami Abadir) is a music producer, sound designer, DJ and music critic born in Cairo, Egypt. His work combines experimental, club and ambient music, and his albums were released on SVBKVLT, Genot Centre, Hush Hush, Yerevan Tapes, Kaer’Uiks among many other labels.
Abadir holds a master’s degree in digital media from the University of Arts Bremen.
Qكيو
DJ
Qusay Awad, aka Qكيو, is a Syrian interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Engaging with spatial design, moving image, performance, and sound art, Awad creates a space for multisensory experiences that explore themes of memory, displacement, and the psyche. Musically, Qكيو transcends genres to focus on atmosphere, storytelling, and the layered elements of his own experimental compositions and rhythmic structures.
Beyond his individual practice, Qكيو has been recognized for his involvement with the C1 collective and collaborations within different creative communities in the city.
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DE & I
TIES is a safe and respectful environment for everyone, regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, or identity. We have a zero-tolerance policy against any forms of racism, sexism, transphobia, and all forms of discrimination or oppressive behaviors.
We are committed to ensuring that our event series is welcoming, accessible, and inclusive to a diverse range of people in Berlin and that it reflects the values of social justice, cultural exchange, and community building.
Below you can find the recordings of panel talks and workshops with German and English subtitles. Our workshops on community-building and pottery could be attended for free with prior registration.
Workshops
Team
Head of production:
Mariana Berezovska
Production by TYME:
Alisa Chepel, Darius Heimann, Jakob Schmilinsky, Michael Wells, Paul Morat, Svitlana Avrakhova, Txai Almeida
Booking:
Olya Petryshyn
Graphic design:
Zweihundertkilo
Photo/video:
Valeria Kotenko
Phillip Ratuschny
Funded by:
Musicboard Berlin GmbH
@tyme.berlin
Berlin based collective born out of shared passion for contemporaty music and visual art.
@borshchmagazine
A space to provoke open dialogues and challenge established ideas about making, listening and dancing to music.
