“Don’t go to Resonate Festival in Belgrade – a warning to artists and audiences“, posted Thomas Ankersmit on April 17th, a day before the festival started. He writes:
“Phill Niblock and myself played a two-hour concert to a full house at the Resonate Festival in Belgrade in April 2017.
A year later we, among many other participants, still haven’t been paid — despite an entire year of empty promises and excuses.”
Also Alessandro Cortini, Caterina Barbieri and Abul Mogard have cancelled their upcoming appearances. A number of artists followed after hearing of previous years’ payment issues. I spoke to friends in Berlin who were upset about the whole issue and decided to cancel as well.
A short article at Resident Advisor states as well that Dutch experimental musician Thomas Ankersmit published the Medium post, writing that “the organization is a tremendous mess,” and that “the habit of not paying participants has persisted for years. The team’s promises cannot be trusted.”
RA states that “in the post he links to a Facebook group organized by artists in Belgrade called Still Unpaid At Resonate Festival. Here a number of local and international artists posted their complaints about payment issues, including pioneering Norwegian ambient musician Biosphere, who played last year”.
According to RA also Berlin-based programmer Gene Kogan published on Twitter that he also hadn’t been paid for the workshop and lecture he gave last year. Resonate hasn’t yet responded to Resident Advisor‘s request for comment. Also friends from Berlin cancelled their trip or concert due to these issues. Koma electronics also wrote they didnt get paid, neither for materials they brought nor for their workshop. Thus they plan to inform the EU funding bodies.
Another Post by keepartevil on April 21st wonders:
Is it time to put down the family cat?
The author is not supprised, but disenchanted: “Having attended five years of the festival, I’d grown to love it the way you love an old family cat that still likes a cuddle but won’t stop shitting all over your new furniture. At the core of every complaint from attendees was the organisational incontinence that resulted in chaos if you hadn’t reached the point where, like my group of fellow attendees, you could throw your hands up in the air and laughingly say, ‘Welcome to Serbia!'”. The author continues that rumors persisted and became harder to ignore after 2017 about non-payment of artists – even for the sake of the family feeling. He continues: “Eventually, many of us fell on the side of solidarity with colleagues and friends and agreed we weren’t attending this year. Personally, I was undecided until almost two weeks before when I had a conversation with an artist who I had attended the festival with every year (in fact, they were one of the two artists who had introduced me to the festival). I think we made the right decision to not attend this year.”
As Ankersmit already mentions Resonate is an EU funded project and usally things like this are not supposed to happen when public money is involved, thats why so much bureaucracy and officalism is involved in those kind of fundings. Many festivals have to struggle, especially in the postsocialist countries, where most of the time no public funding is available from the state or city. But any which way people should get paid and btw not only the artists, also organizers and helpers, which are usually not thought of because its done for passion. And this blurres the line between work and cultural activism. But if funding is involved one wonders where the money went? Especially because for most of the people involved in these scenes it is a precarious situation and life worlds, and thats why solidarity and reliability or at least open communication is so important. If they wouldn’t have had enough money and just told it openly to everybody, maybe most would have supported the festival anyways?
