INOTA 2023

The INOTA Festival is a joint initiative of the Veszprém-Balaton 2023 European Capital of Culture program, the 18-year-old NVC event organization collective, and Centrum Production. Created by the Hungarian underground music and visual scene, INOTA 2023 aims to be Hungary's biggest event that features not only forward-thinking music acts but also light installations, mapping, and other contemporary visual arts.

The spectacular Inotai thermal power plant was the biggest industrial investment in Hungary in the 1950s: at its peak, it could have provided street lighting and tram services for the whole of Budapest.

THE LOCATION

The cooling towers - which are also reflected in the visual identity of the event, as well as the processing and rebirth of coal - are of course only part of the 225,000 square meter facility, which closed permanently in 2001. The INOTA Festival will also use the turbine hall, which rivals the monumentality of London's Printworks, the vast boiler room, and the impressive community center, giving them over to the most exciting contemporary artists.

Just as the complex provided jobs and livelihoods for hundreds of people and their families in its time, the INOTA Festival from 31 August to 3 September will fill these spaces with a wide variety of impulses, focusing above all on artists and performers who revolutionize genres, push boundaries, inspire thought and plant seeds of ideas in the minds of the beholder.

THE PERFORMERS

Among the first names are one of the most original artists on the British electronic scene, Daniel Avery, who released his groundbreaking album Ultra Truth last year, and Anglo-German post-punk band Lebanon Hanover; the synthesizer virtuoso Caterina Barbieri, who creates ecstatic emotional eddies in the House of Music Concert Hall, the Colombian Lucrecia Dalt, who creates magnetic atmospheres, and Extrawelt, who will be giving the world premiere of their new album and Robert Henke, who thrillingly marries contemporary aesthetics with outdated technology from 40 years ago.

On the visual and light art front, Fuse, Maotik and Max Cooper with a full-scale, three-dimensional visual image stream, and Oscar Mulero and Lewis Fautzi with techno tailored to factory buildings, will be coming to Inota; and from the domestic scene, original ideas from artists such as Mákó Mári, who works on his own instruments, Platon Karataev, who invites us to a folk-psychedelic post-rock trio, Iamyank, who has just released a new album, and the ever-renewing Zságer Balázs. The list is by no means complete, check the festival's website for more artists, a second wave of acts will be arriving soon.

And the project does not stop there: INOTA's firm objective is to create a professional dialogue between representatives of different artistic disciplines and the creative industries, in order to create a forward-looking, ambitious vision of the potential uses of the complex at the foot of the three iconic cooling towers.

INSTALLATIONS: Ari Dykier / Köves Éva & Sztojánovits Andrea / Circus Lumineszenz / Totem of Reflections