The DIY acronym has long been oscillating through festival culture. In recent years, the romanticism of rave has since seen it cut up and sold for parts to splice a razor edge on the commercial music landscape. In doing so, ‘DIY’ has become misconstrued or, in some cases, exploited by business interests. So what exactly does it mean to be a DIY collective? We attended the fourth edition of Traumburg festival to uncover how they navigate creative freedom in an increasingly demanding festival climate.
In the midst of the post-pandemic dancefloor resuscitation, a group of friends in Germany combined their loose change to organise a house party for their friends. The plans quickly escalated and the idea grew into a small festival set on the site of an abandoned mid-century castle in the district of Dornburg. Built for a queen who never moved in, the castle respawned in 2020 when fifty or so inquisitive artists and creatives painted the powdery halls with sound, lighting, interactive installations, art, sculptures, and decorations. The organisers asked themselves: ‘how did this house party get so out of hand?’
DIY; now and then
Dance music is DIY in nature, long before it brushed hands with commercial business. Proof is in the name; take the DiY Sound System from Nottingham, UK which was an acid house collective active during the inception of the free party movement in 1989 that began as a series of house parties. Further back, DIY music scenes are rooted in punk anarchist squats, Jamaican reggae and dub sound systems, and new-age traveller trucks. These were scenes formed with an ideological purpose cemented in an alternative mindset. Created by marginalised groups who carved their own community spaces, and middle-class misfits who were disenfranchised with mundane society seeking corners of curiosity, DIY is far more than a craft. It’s a philosophy rooted in enabling autonomous expression and collective skill sharing. It is the art of nonconforming to systemic spaces of teachings.
Today, traces of DIY dance heritage still exist in the underground crevices. But going against the grain becomes increasingly difficult when affordable spaces are gold dust, ‘free’ space is exchanged for shiny apartments, and economic pressure increases costs. This demands more fluid cooperation and understanding amongst organisers, artists, venues, councils, and other cultural facilitators as there are many limitations to untangle. The exploration of DIY is based less on reinventing the philosophical wheel, and instead bends towards structural and operational discourse. Blending the ‘free’ spirit of the past with the resource limitations of the present is how Traumburg grounded itself on halcyon soil.
'The only way to realise a DIWO mentality is that everyone is equal'
How to DIWO (Do It With Others)
Traumburg is different from other festivals. Upon first glance it has a cosy and charming aura which opens its doors to adventurous minds. ‘There’s a whole vibe and magic that’s very specific there’, mentions Cyberfairy777 of Rotterdam-based events series and collective Feverdream. Diving into the festival's philosophy, Traumburg is defined by an embrace of autonomy and spontaneity, where the approach is a little unorthodox to others in the festival circuit. This is realised by their ethos ‘Do It With Others (DIWO). The crew explains that ‘the only way to realise a DIWO mentality is that everyone is equal, there is no hierarchy between organisers, artists, and guests.’ From the first edition, due to its ‘house party’ nature, supporters (Traumburg’s reference to people working on a volunteer basis) chipped in the same amount of money as the organisers and brought their own skill and motivation to the castle. Although now volunteer-based for the supporters, and fee/commission-based for the artists, Traumburg represents a democratisation of accountability within the collective where ‘everyone is responsible for their own ideas’. This democratisation extends to the guests. ‘When we invite people as an artist we usually expect that they will stay at the festival. They are not here just to present their creativity, they are going to be part of the experience and the crowd.’
When the idea of artist and guest are intertwined, any chain of command is revoked, and the festival’s genome becomes a synchronised organism. For example, Rotterdam-based artist duo .bytches was a new project between the two friends Lotte Louise de Jong and Noémi Biró looking to sync their creative skills by exploring live coding. They asked festival guests to take phone recordings of artefacts they saw at the festival and fed this into live visual coding to render a 3D model. ‘In our background, it's important to share knowledge and methods and get people to use their own stories. People started dancing towards the projections, so they became part of the whole experience.’
Sustained spontaneity
At Traumburg, it’s less about one collaborative mindset running like a well-oiled machine. It’s a cross-pollination of ideas and attitudes that flow in undetermined directions. ‘Everything is spontaneous at Traumburg. Each year we never know what’s coming. That’s one of the beauties of it, but you have to mentally prepare for chaos’, explains Max Mesing, who manages production. However, even this spontaneity needs some kind of structure: 'We are planning, contacting artists, managing open calls or organising materials throughout the year.'
The build-up is centred around an annual theme which artists and supporters weave into their work. Having access to a site that is empty most of the year, the crew store the decorations in a next-door barn and reuses them in different forms each edition, allowing their supporters access to offer freedom of commitment when setting up. ‘Flexibility is key because we like to put a focus on sustainability, so we never create something completely new. We adapt the purpose, colour, shapes, so the production is always evolving.’
Sustained spontaneity
At Traumburg, it’s less about one collaborative mindset running like a well-oiled machine. It’s a cross-pollination of ideas and attitudes that flow in undetermined directions. ‘Everything is spontaneous at Traumburg. Each year we never know what’s coming. That’s one of the beauties of it, but you have to mentally prepare for chaos’, explains Max Mesing, who manages production. However, even this spontaneity needs some kind of structure: 'We are planning, contacting artists, managing open calls or organising materials throughout the year.'
The build-up is centred around an annual theme which artists and supporters weave into their work. Having access to a site that is empty most of the year, the crew store the decorations in a next-door barn and reuses them in different forms each edition, allowing their supporters access to offer freedom of commitment when setting up. ‘Flexibility is key because we like to put a focus on sustainability, so we never create something completely new. We adapt the purpose, colour, shapes, so the production is always evolving.’
Traumburg’s festival approach is explorative, and this hands-off approach derives from their house party archetype with the site inviting a playfulness to these creative quests. Rare in itself that a festival gets permission to use the insides of a building with protected heritage, the castle became an explorative instrument of its own; when met with a blank canvas, everyone had their turn with the brush. Nikos, a Rotterdam-based artist who runs the ambient event series Pelagic, discusses the different ways they have performed in the castle. ‘I have played club sets in the basement, but I have also pulled in sofas at the end of the night to play ambient sessions for people who want a quieter space.’ In essence, there’s a real modularity about the site and the way it’s interacted with, like when Translucid pulled the DJ booth into the middle of the garden and incited a socially intimate exchange on the dancefloor between partygoers whilst traversing through iterations of psychoactive experiments.
The underbelly of the castle, which marks the demonic yet cosy coordinates of the basement, is home to the rumbling transmissions of Kantarion Sound. At one point during the weekend, Cyberfairy777 located a secret passageway that snaked through the concrete network of basement tunnels to set up an off-timetable squat party with a boombox. ‘Feverdream started out as illegal raves, so we decided to go on these side quests. We even chose to climb over a gate instead of going through the main entrance whilst carrying a pair of JBL speakers and a DJ controller. It was just to add to the excitement; we’re a team of little rascals.’ At this point, everything started to make sense; people, spaces, and art operated in transient circumventions. Each supporter, artist, and guest were carving their own stories within a dream-like state. ‘Being there feels like one big collective adventure full of surprises, from start to finish’, explains Vox Supreme, promoter and label head of Traumgarten. It’s not about conforming to the rules, it’s about writing your own rulebook.
'The magic is not something you can get from day jobs’'
Building compatible communities through DIWO
DIWO invites a certain personal connection. It's not only about exploring creative and artistic ideas, it places importance on relationship building from a grassroots chain reaction. Nurturing their creative network is of high importance, and many of the artists have a pre-existing artistic relationship with one another. They look after their established community of creatives because they possess a plethoric set of skills that helps to scope and define what it means to DIWO. .bytches explain that ‘there’s this attitude of curiosity and people supporting each other, we’re all open to things failing, and we’re here to learn’. A dialogue as to what this means to the crew is in a constant state of alteration. A practical way of measuring this is through their feedback form which they share with supporters, artists, and guests after each edition.
Yet, as the festival grows, the crew places equal importance on outwardly expanding relationships as long as new artists bring an aligned spirit and creative idea. ‘After the first edition, we had a very close relationship with the students of the Royal Arts Academy of The Hague. A lot of artists from that institution opened our doors to a lot of new artists from that environment.’ They also achieve this via their annual open call encouraging open-minded creative pitches that span DJing/live, performance art, installations, and workshops. Vox Supreme describes it as ‘Traumburg enabling artists to turn their dreams and visions into reality’. In this sense, DIWO sustains local connectivity, builds like-minded artist networks, explores new ways of thinking, and preserves the house party spirit. ‘It comes from people who are really interested in the project itself, it’s a little bit like a chain’, exclaims one of the core crew members. So their aim is to fortify interpersonal relationships and work towards an equal playground where anyone can showcase their artistic work. ‘We want to give everyone the chance to do what they love’.
…but at what ‘cost’?
Traumburg is a labour of love, and the artistic work responsible for its flourishment is a passionate extension of that. ‘Some of us work 50-60 hours per week. But Traumburg still feels like the centre of our lives, it doesn’t feel like work. The magic is not something you can get from day jobs’. The crew approaches the DIWO ethos by decentering financial success as the prime motivator behind the festival. Its beauty comes from the dissemination of an individualist attitude and is why the concept could appear bizarre when the underground electronic music industry increasingly views art and culture through a commercial lens, whether this is out of choice to capitalise or out of necessity to survive.
Due to their limited budget, Traumburg is unable to match standard artist fees, but ‘the artists really want to come because the ethos fits with the work they want to create’. In this case, fully autonomous self-expression does come at a cost. In an environment where commercial-mindedness is knocked off the priority list, there's almost an expectation that creative control is a trade-off for the lack of budget available. This perspective deactivates the idea that creativity can be exploited in vain for money. But to achieve this in a constructive way, everyone involved needs to forfeit commercial thinking, which in many cases is idealistic, as well as alienating groups of people who are marginalised by income and wealth. What becomes crucial to overcome tensions around this subject is transparency and the desire to engage in open dialogue.
Unlocking new doors invites new possibilities
The crew is aware that with growth comes new opportunities. ‘Every year I’m happy to see the festival expanding, bringing disciplines together’, explains Nikos of Pelagic. But, with growth comes the challenge to maintain the shared community spirit Traumburg is most loved for. The last edition welcomed 300 supporters, artists, and guests which was the first time people visited without some level of involvement in the festival. Vox Supreme adds that ‘the challenge for festivals like this is growing without losing sight of what you initially set out to do. I hope the crew can maintain the amount of passion and ambition that I feel they are putting into this project and continue to challenge themselves and their audience along the way.’
As the festival has now sold out its 2024 edition, they have been met with rising costs and the reality of the strain a growing capacity has on the energy of their supporters. To protect their ethos, they have made a choice to make room for more supporters in exchange for an increased ticket price for guests. After all, preserving Traumburg’s ecosystem begins with those who dedicate their time to build something special for collective joy, over single-mindedly prioritising the satisfaction of guests. ‘As an expanding organisation, I hope those who put the most work in can still enjoy the festival’ explains Cyberfairy777. And with workers' interests at heart, that is truly DIY.
