Walden: Sounds and Performances in the Woods of Berlin. Since 2021 Walden is an annual gathering in and around Berlin’s Künstlerhof Frohnau. A festival for sound, music, and performance that speaks to many: to Berliners of all ages and from across the city, and to those working at the edges of sound, movement, poetry, and the visual arts.
Each year, Walden opens a space rarely found in Berlin’s festival landscape: a confluence of the time-based arts, interdisciplinary and urgent, shared freely beneath the open sky. Artists inhabit the forest as stage and instrument, drawing resonance from trees and ruins, from the layered past of this liminal ground. Here, they trace the shifting borders between nature and culture, city and edge, memory and the present moment. The artistic contributions are selected by a team of curators and are in part specifically produced for the event, in the residency studios and workshops of Künstlerhof Frohnau. The festival values accessibility, both physical and emotional, and grows through its ties with the local community.
Künstlerhof Frohnau lies at Berlin’s northern edge, where the city gives way to forest. For 25 years, these scattered buildings have sheltered artists; for over a century, the surrounding land has borne witness to those displaced or broken by history: war invalids, refugees, psychiatric patients. The forest still holds their traces. Memorials lie among the trees, marking where lives were lost trying to cross the former inner-German border—a geography of sorrow and resistance.
Walden listens to these echoes. It asks how we might transform a wounded landscape into a space of belonging. How can we acknowledge fragility—our own, each other’s, the world’s—and build a community from it? One that honors what has passed, and remains open to what is yet to come.
People
Contact us
Walden is a project by
Künstlerhof Frohnau – KHF Berlin
Hubertusweg 60
13465 Berlin
For all inquiries please write to walden@khf-berlin.org