The panel will focus on the connections between art, political responsibility, and cultural resilience in the context of a shift to the right in society.

The starting point is Kay Voges' artistic practice at the Vienna Volkstheater and now at the Schauspiel Köln, in which he productively intertwines social responsibility and aesthetic contradiction through performative provocation. His position embodies a theatrical practice that seeks the political in the aesthetic and generates reflection through irritation.

As festival director of c/o pop, Elke Kuhlen brings a pop-cultural perspective to the table and raises the question of how music and urban culture can assert themselves in the face of political appropriation. Timo Warkus, singer of the band Team Scheisse, represents a contemporary punk attitude that can become “the republic's rowdy pulse meter and seismograph of social tensions” (according to author Marco Nehmer in the RND) – raw, direct, and resistant.

Joe, the bassist in the band The Red Flags, says she’s “not in the mood to keep her mouth shut”, thereby asserting a right to visibility and a clear stance. Here, punk is understood as a practice that deliberately opposes silence and conformity and publicly voices dissent.

Central themes are the necessity of artistic provocation as a form of democratic vigilance, the danger of cultural self-censorship, and the question of how art and cultural institutions can respond to populist shifts in discourse without compromising their open values.