_DE
Studio Sven Sauer’s installations focus on a theme that increasingly challenges our times: hope—not as an idealized state, but as a real, verifiable trace. Hope is considered a remnant of a bygone era, an abstract symbol. We are too surrounded by noise, disillusionment, and cynicism, amid all the clamor and images that bombard us every day.
Studio Sven Sauer searches for these hidden traces of hope in our reality. Their works are the result of extensive research, data, statistics, and scientific studies collected over decades.
For hope, as his work suggests, is not a sentimental feeling, but a measurable phenomenon. It flickers in data series, in ecological forecasts, in social fractures, and in the quiet perseverance of people and systems.
Deviation spreads out across the room as a carpet of glass fragments, woven from shards collected from all over the world. In our society, broken glass symbolizes something ominous. Broken windows precede earthquakes. Shards are broken during riots when anger thunders against shop windows. And there is glass that is deliberately broken to stop people. Shards of glass on the tops of walls. Sharp-edged borders.
But are we really as dark as we perceive ourselves to be? Based on texts by historian Rutger Bergman, the installation reveals another truth: in times of great hopelessness, history shows cooperation prevails. From certain angles, the processed shards catch light and divide it a hundredfold, turning fragments of destruction into reflections of hope.
Colegiata del Palacio
de Revillagigedo
Thursday, April 30
to Sunday, May 3
11:00 – 21:00 h
Credits:
Artwork „Deviation“: Studio Sven Sauer
Train modification: @helldorfer_engineering
Electronics: Lukas Esser
Creative coding: @bruno.ammon
Production: @nsevvalg / @martinhussain
Music: @theatre_of_delays
Texts and studies: @RutgerBregman
Clips: @frank_sauer
_TW
The Explorer, the Wanderer, the Guide. Once, multiple wandering spirits inhabited a single body. The subconscious opened fissures within the soul, with dreams acting as one of its storage nodes…
The core concept, Di-shan (遞嬗), refers to the process by which things replace one another in sequence, gradual transformation, alternation, and evolution, emphasizing continuity and inheritance across time. This project brings together sound, image, and interactive structures to explore states of transition and mutation within contemporary perception
Taiwanese experimental music producer and sound artist Meuko! Meuko! returns to L.E.V Festival with her first cross-disciplinary collaboration with Berlin-based interactive installation artist Hsiangfu Chen. Premiering at the L.E.V. festival’s 20th edition, the project takes shape as an audiovisual live performance that brings sound, image, and interaction into dialogue.
Sound + Visual by: PENG, SHI-YUN (Meuko! Meuko!)
Installation by: CHEN, HSIANG-FU
_AR
Deeply rooted in Buenos Aires’ drum and bass underground music scene, Argentinian artist Amparo Battaglia started performing as Catnapp in 2010, combining breakbeat, drum and bass, jungle, dancehall and pop.
Based in Berlin since 2015, Catnapp continued her artistic evolution with the creation of the label Napp Records, aimed at supporting new artists and providing a safe and fair environment, while having a space for her own releases. One year later she signed with Monkeytown Records where she released plenty of music and toured opening for the electronic music duo Modeslektor and bands such as Moderat. Catnapp has also performed at festivals and venues such as Berghain (Berlin), Boiler Room (Berlin), Fusion (Berlin), Melt (Berlin), SXSW (Austin), Sonar (Barcelona) and Reeperbahnfestival (Hamburg & Beijing) among many others.
One of Catnapp’s main driving forces is the freedom to blur and reshape gender boundaries. Rather than fitting into predefined categories, her focus lies in creating music that feels good, fun, interesting and genuine. Highly energetic, both her sound and live performances are defined by a striking contrast, shifting between cute and scary, maybe even slightly uncomfortable.
Nave.
LABoral Centro de Arte
Saturday May 2nd
_JP
“nD” is a diptych audiovisual performance piece and the third version of the audiovisual project “cm:av_c,” which has been developed over many years. In this piece, the phenomena of sound and vision, the modes of abstraction and concreteness, and the qualities of meaningfulness and meaninglessness are embodied in the continuous fluctuation between duality and non-duality.
The diptych is not arranged solely to present opposition or difference, but rather as a site in which our perception oscillates between separation and inseparability. By treating and fusing sound and image at an abstract level, it creates an intense audiovisual experience that simultaneously stimulates sight and hearing. This pure audiovisual expression, stripped of meaning, liberates the audience from the constraints of interpretation, guiding them toward a more direct and sensory experience.
Japanese artist, Ryoichi Kurokawa composes in sound and light, using analog and digitally generated materials to create time-bending audiovisual installations, video screenings, audio recordings and performances that melt multi-channel image and sound into one entity, existing in continual evolution. A long-standing pursuit since the early stages of Kurokawa’s career, the project “cm:av_c,” strongly reflects his unique and iconic artistic language. The first version, “cm:av_c,” premiered in 2005 and has since been presented worldwide, including at Tate Modern (UK), Ars Electronica (AT), and MUTEK (CA). In 2011, the second version, “syn_ [ cm:av_c 2 ],” was released and performed in over 20 countries over several years. “nD [ cm:av_c 3 ]” will premiere at L.E.V. Festival’s 20th anniversary, representing a further evolution of this project.
_US
A math lover, former steel factory worker, and proud resident of Gary, Indiana, Jlin (née Jerrilynn Patton) has become one of the most distinctive composers in America and one of the most influential women in electronic music. Jlin’s signature sound builds on the Chicago footwork style of her origins, expanding to embrace diverse influences (ranging from Igor Stravinsky and Philip Glass to Miles Davis and Eartha Kitt) that give her complex percussion-driven work a sophisticated polyrhythmic sound that is all its own.
Jlin’s thrilling, emotional, and multidimensional compositions have earned her praise as “one of the most forward-thinking contemporary composers in any genre” (Pitchfork). Jlin was a 2023 Pulitzer Prize nominee for Perspective – originally commissioned and performed by Third Coast Percussion. Her albums Dark Energy (2015) and Black Origami (2017) received critical acclaim and have been featured in “best of” lists in The New York Times, The Wire, LA Times, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Vogue.
Her latest album, Akoma (Planet Mu) – heralded as “her most formidable work to date” (Bandcamp) – was released on March 22, 2024 and features collaborations with Philip Glass, Björk, and Kronos Quartet. Referencing a wide range of musical movements and techniques, Jlin has collaborated with contemporary artists including William Basinski, Dope Saint Jude, Holly Herndon, Zora Jones, and the late, iconic SOPHIE. She has remixed works for major artists including Björk, Max Richter, Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode), Galya Bisengalieva, Marie Davidson, Nina Kraviz, Ben Frost, and others. Jlin was named a 2023 USA Artists Fellow.
In May 2025, Jlin composed and premiered the first ever piece of electronic music commissioned by the US Library of Congress.
Muséu del Pueblu d’Asturies
Saturday May 2nd
_DE
HYBR:ID UNI PARA is Alva Noto’s latest audiovisual performance, evolving from his HYbr:ID album series. Building on the project’s meticulous sound design, the expanded live language creates spatial atmospheres in which data-driven processes are translated into perceptual and affective experiences.
Under the pseudonym Alva Noto is Carsten Nicolai, a German artist and musician based in Berlin and is one of the best-known representatives of contemporary electronic music. Born in 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, he is part of a generation of artists who works intensively in the transitional area between music, art, and scienceInspired by scientific reference systems, Nicolai explores mathematical patterns such as grids and codes, error and random structures, as well as the phenomenon of self-organisation. In doing so, he continually breaks down the boundaries between various artistic genres.
Concerts have taken Alva Noto to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Modern in London. His various musical projects include collaborations with Ryōji Ikeda, Mika Vainio, Iggy Pop, Blixa Bargeld and Ryūichi Sakamoto. With the latter, Nicolai composed the music for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning film The Revenant, which was nominated for a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and a Grammy in the Best Original Score category.
