The year 2020 marks a meaningful milestone for Torstraßen Festival: our first decade. Now in our tenth edition, we’ve once again dedicated a Saturday (and night!) to discovering the latest developments in Berlin’s pop underground. Over 30 different artists, bands DJs and performers from the city’s various scenes in its international network will gather throughout various venues in Berlin-Mitte. As a special feature for this double-digit occasion, a photo exhibition – based on the countless festival photos from our archive – will offer the chance to trace the recent history and evolution of Berlin’s subcultural music scenes. And on Sunday, we’re back in the beautiful Volksbühne for the Independent Label Market, rounded out with a closing concert on the theater’s main stage.

The Roman numeral “X” for 10 is the leitmotif for this landmark edition of the festival. X also symbolizes coming together and exchange, a crossroads of perspectives that converge, meet, overlap and perhaps contradict. Since the beginning, TSF has been bringing together various sounds, scenes, venues and people – and so the X embodies the festival’s story and ethos. On a larger scale, we would like to take the chance to discuss issues of community and solidarity. We live in a world that faces environmental degradation and climate change, where new and old forms of fascism are on the rise,and neoliberal structures have promoted an increasingly individualistic society. In such a scenario, there’s an urgent need to unite, to form communities, to turn »independent« into »interdependent«. To develop agency together in a way that takes into account different perspectives, especially marginalized ones.