»Sonic Crossings« – A Conversation about Pop, Belonging, and Musical Transgressions (EN)

A collaboration between Pop-Kultur Festival Berlin, the music department of the Goethe-Institut, and Goethe-Institut in Exile

What does it mean to think sound at the edges of borders – or beyond them?
Sonic Crossings marks the launch of a collaborative project that seeks not to reduce pop and pop music to a single narrative, but to open them up – to a plurality of artists, experiences, and sonic worlds that may be geographically rooted but resist simple national categorisation.
The first edition focuses on musicians from the South Caucasus – Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. It‘s not about defining a »sound of the region«, but about individual musical practices that move between local expressions, global pop culture, and diasporic realities.

At the heart of the talk »Sonic Crossings« is a conversation with invited artists: members of the Armenian band Symptom Error and Azerbaijani sound artist Nazrin Mammadova. The panel also includes Giorgi Rodionov, a curator and cultural producer from Georgia.
This conversation sets the thematic stage for the participating artists’ musical performances at Pop-Kultur Festival 2025. How is »pop« understood in each local context – between festival stages in Berlin and performances in Yerevan, Baku, or Tbilisi? Where do unexpected connections arise – between genres, scenes, or lived diasporic experiences? What role do historical ruptures, archives, folk traditions, or the Soviet legacy play in the contemporary sound? And how can music become a space for self-location – beyond national definitions?
Crossings – geographic, aesthetic, biographical – are at the core of this conversation. The involvement of the Goethe-Institut in Exile highlights political contexts in which displacement, exile, and cultural relocation also reshape sonic environments.

Sonic Crossings asks how music crosses borders – and sometimes even makes them audible.