A new district for Hamburg

The MS ARTVILLE site as Hamburg’s 105th district and urban space for art and discourse – that is the ambitious thematic objective of the MS ARTVILLE 2018.

In addition to the 104 regular city districts, Hamburg will thus gain a new meta city district, the 105th, in which questions about “where our society is developing” can be asked through art.

The initial idea of a new music and art festival for Hamburg in 2007, the first year of the festival, has over the years become much more than just “another festival”. As a collective joint work of artists, visitors and festival organizers, a small (meta-)district of its own has grown up on the site in Hamburg’s harbour: Hamburg’s 105th district and urban space with plenty of space for art and discourse. Over the past eleven years, the new district has continually developed and gained in importance – in Wilhelmsburg, in Hamburg and beyond. The time has come to open up this new part of the city even more. This opening also includes an even stronger connection with the “mother city district” Wilhelmsburg. The foundation stone for this is to be laid in 2018 and a new form of the public to be tested.

For over ten years now, the MS ARTVILLE site has been an island of urban art and an oasis of creativity in the middle of the port of Hamburg. Surrounded by water and the continuously growing areas of the port and logistics industry, a cultural biotope has developed on the festival site over a period of more than a decade. Integrated and firmly interwoven with the remaining spatial, urban structures of the city, this cultural open space is detached from the practical constraints of this very real city at the same time. Summer after summer, the MS ARTVILLE site offers the basis for an intensive dialogue between international artists, their works and, last but not least, visitors. At MS ARTVILLE 2018 we want to take a look behind the supposedly logical physical shell of the city and question social mechanisms and set structures.

New space for discourse

Without the imposed factual constraints as they exist in the surrounding city, this urban-cultural interspace offers extensive space for art and discourse: an urban society lives from civil coexistence, from communication and said discourse. Art and culture can initiate and promote if the appropriate framework conditions and sufficient space are available. For this reason, a special focus of MS ARTVILLE 2018 will be set on the critical discourse between art and visitors. We want to discuss the future of art and urban society together – during the festival events and far beyond.