Happily touched in Eupen

The system Meakusma, if you want to describe this festival as such, it is an inviting, idiosyncratic biotope that you will never quite succeed in deciphering. At least as visitors coming from outside to Eupen in Belgium once a year. It starts with the very own tempo that prevails in the small Belgian town: everything seems to be going a bit slower – and yet the frequency of the festival is so crazy high; I can’t think of any other festival that offers such a high concentration of performances in such a small area.

In 2022, the festival included everything again, from performances lost in gestures, in which the artists could hardly hide that they were violently tampering with their self-imposed ambitions (or sometimes their self-chosen artistic paradigm) via a large amount of contemporary performances on a solid to good level up to those sets that left you happily touched (such as Anadol, Marylou, John FM Pessimist or even Holy Tongue in my case). I’m sure I could have learned more from the last category if a) not so many performances that interested me had taken place in the cold room, which was often filled with brutalists – too bad they weren’t partly scheduled in the afternoon and outside – and I b) unfortunately had to leave on Saturday morning not because of an illness.
So the experiences in 2022 condensed into two intense days and nights in which I – and that’s always the best thing about the Meakusma anyway – expected and unexpectedly met many old acquaintances in order to experience this great great overload of music together with them and sort.
For those who didn’t make it this year, the Festival playlist recommended as a source of inspiration.