SHARPE Festival bursts ballooning authoritarianism

Ana Marjanidze – the Georgian DJ also known as 3AM – recounts one such example. Attempting to repel an army of electronic music fans protesting in the Georgian capital, riot police blasted a piercing, bleeping siren. Goosebumps sweep the room when Marjanidze explains what happened next: everyone started dancing. The protestors adopted this sound of hate and made it their anthem of resistance and empowerment.

“It’s in our blood,” she says. “We dance on that.”

The word on – instead of to – is significant here, because the protestors were not bystanders; they were the ones gaining ground, parking their tanks on the authorities’ lawn. Nasra Omar from Arts Council Norway suggests a better metaphor: “If you rip up the flowers, they’ll grow back somewhere else – and keep growing.”

SHARPE Festival is a two-and-a-half-day celebration of wild, stubborn, beautiful flowers – of creativity and community and how, when growing together, those things are invincible against oppression. Based in Slovakia’s capital city, SHARPE is one of Europe’s smaller showcase festivals – 48 artists, six stages, only seven years old – but small doesn’t rule out profound or impactful. Change starts at home, and SHARPE is a courageous little pin that can be enlarged or duplicated to pop ballooning authoritarianism on a global scale.

But let’s not get too ambitious; let’s talk about home. During my four days in Bratislava (what I’m calling brat spring), protests against Prime Minister Robert Fico’s administration rage outside government buildings, as they have throughout the year. Fico is your boilerplate Putin-lover, thumbing through the authoritarian instruction manual while kissing the rings of Orbán and other strongmen. What’s more, he installed Martina Šimkovičová – the anti-vax TV presenter – as Slovakia’s Minister of Culture. She is dead-set on ripping up the flowers, gutting the country’s previously independent cultural institutions, slashing funding, firing directors, you name it.

However, like the Georgian police with their accidental club classic, Šimkovičová underestimates the resilience of the communities she’s antagonising. SHARPE is partially dependent on government funding, but as we learn from another conference speaker, arts attorney Matthew Covey, “At a certain point there isn’t gonna be any money – but that doesn’t mean the art stops.”

Slovak National Radio is one institution that has so far dodged Šimkovičová’s sledgehammer. Its headquarters is supposedly the world’s ugliest building, an 80-metre-tall inverted pyramid, but the interior is even more fascinating, its autumnal décor resembling a lost Wes Anderson film, The Grand Bratislava Radio Tower.

Pastel-puke-green carpet leads you past long-loved mid-century furniture, sporadically placed houseplants of all shapes and sizes, intersecting staircases, old rotary phones and retired radio equipment, and blood-red doors emblazoned with enticingly mysterious signage. A native speaker translates one with a baffled shrug: “VISUAL ARTISTIC REALISATION.” Whatever that means.

Built between 1967 and 1983, the Slovak National Radio Building has morphed the awkward legacy of communism into something unique and hybrid. A venerable concert hall is hidden underground, and several floors above is the Rádio_FM studio. For now, Šimkovičová and her goons have been too preoccupied to undermine the station’s autonomy, so it continues to rage against the machine on channel four, playing music by government-critical and LGBTQ+ alternative acts. Their one golden rule: 35% of these must be from Slovakia.

SHARPE adopts a similar quota: 22 of its 48 artists this year are Slovak, and they span the genre gamut on offer this weekend. Skinny with youth and black band tees, Eversame are unsmiling stick figures conjuring gloomy shoegaze storm clouds late on Saturday. Submit to their layers of thick, sluicy guitar murk and it’ll start to give up glimmers of light – see the song “glimmer”, for one, and “nothing” has lots to write home about too. In a just world, Anglo circles would file Eversame right alongside in-crowd emo-leaning dreamers such as Julie and Shower Curtain.

Homegrown DJ and producer Neraev (a name I like to think translates to ‘new rave’) has a shades-on, cooler-than-you USP ready to be exported far and wide. She lives and dies by the breakbeat, but has the smokey, lulling vocals and ping-ponging synths to complete the package. If all club music sounded more like “Cloud9”, I’d consider never sleeping again. Just as immersive, duo Božské Soaré’s soundscapes make me think of a giant, benevolent supercomputer, flickering and glitching as it gobbles up excerpts from humanity: minimalist grand piano motifs, and field recordings of rain, tweeting birds, rattling trains, and waves crashing on the shore. They sound like Cluster and William Basinski redoing the Voyager Golden Record, everything pulled into orbit by a reliable, mechanical pulse.

These performances blare through a setting just as extraordinary as Rádio_FM’s top-heavy home. Unlike the showcase festival setup I’m used to, where you leg it around an unfamiliar city while swearing at Google Maps, SHARPE is contained within one campus. Its labyrinthine host, on the periphery of Bratislava next door to an imposing disused grain storage facility, is named Nová Cvernovka, which just about translates to ‘new thread factory’. It never was a thread factory, but this cultural and creative centre was founded by artists who ditched an actual thread factory back in 2016 in search of a cheaper base.

Over the last decade, a laborious facelift has transformed the rundown, leaky compound – once a chemical factory, then a high school – and surrounding acres of jungle into a quasi-commune in which many people live and/or work. There’s an experimental school. The farm is home to chickens and the cutest, chubbiest rabbits ever. And there are 132 artists’ studios, some of which retain the names they had during the high school years – e.g. “teacher’s office.”

Bikes and old couches, pianos and football tables clutter the hallways of the residential wing (usually closed to the public), but this evidence of routine fun is countered by experimental innovations, such as toilets that flush with rainwater and the extensive mushroom laboratory (15 varieties; half of them medicinal). Nová Cvernovka is an inspiring place – a case study in radical social and environmental reform that works. And back downstairs, SHARPE’s mission and the values of its performers are in close alignment.

“A beautiful festival like this is based on communication; SHARPE festival – great communicators,” says Bjarni Daníel, singer of Reykjavík band Supersport!. The quartet abides not by DIY but DIT (do it together), and being the festival’s only Icelandic act – travelling further than anyone – they make their 40 minutes count. This is pop music, through and through, but it also has the clumsy, gangly energy of math rock or mid-Atlantic emo, of being young and in love with everything while also itching to rip it all up and try something else. The band exasperatedly tangle these knots in stop-start surges while Þóra Birgit Bernódusdóttir, their foil, grounds everything with her dependable bass playing and calming vocal harmonies.

Supersport! are a tough act to top, but at SHARPE, you’re privileged enough to drift or stomp from room to room, country to country, exploring one new world after another. Verde Prato’s world steals your breath and your anxiety as she floats serenely across the stage, twirling to the blip-blop bossa nova of “Un sol claro” or locking into a mimed boxing match with front-row spectators during the meaner, sexier songs in the set’s back half. You leave the Basque Country and enter Lelee’s world, gleeful and riotous – their smile-sung indie rock choruses beaming Slovenian sunshine into the room. The library stage hosts secret, low-key/low-volume performances throughout the weekend in a cosy, fairy-light-lit world insulated from outside bustle. And German solo artist Jesper Munk’s world is fragile, burnished, and out-of-time – perhaps the most arresting performance of the weekend.

It’s not just Munk’s one-man show, which seamlessly moves from can’t-look-away storytelling on a battered piano, to old-school blues barking, through clanging treble-trash on a suffering Danelectro guitar. It’s how the crowd responds. Unprompted, one by one, we move into a cross-legged position on the floor, a posture better suited to Munk’s intensity. I love that everyone wordlessly understands this assignment. The context may different, but like Georgia’s siren-sound ravers, we adapt to our environment together, like flowers finding a way through the cracks.