On the last weekend of the summer, the first INOTA Festival will bring together the Hungarian underground music and visual scene – concerts, light installations, mapping and other contemporary visual art for four days. Dreamed up in a spectacular venue, the festival is a joint initiative of the Veszprém-Balaton 2023 European Capital of Culture programme, the 18-year-old NVC event-organising collective and Centrum Production.
The Inota thermal power plant, which is in itself a spectacular sight, was the largest industrial investment in Hungary in the 1950s: at its peak it generated enough electricity to power the street lighting and tram traffic of Budapest. Its three huge, spectacular cooling towers are almost universally known, and it is worth mentioning that their innovative technology was considered revolutionary at the time, winning engineers László Heller and László Forgó the Grand Prix at the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition. It was thanks to Inota that these distinctive looking cooling towers soon spread around the world.
The towers, which are also reflected in the visual identity of the event, are just part of the 225,000 square metre facility that closed down permanently in 2001. INOTA Festival will also make use of the turbine hall, which beats the monumentality of London’s Printworks, the vast boiler room and the impressive community centre, and hand them over to the most exciting contemporary artists.
Performers include Daniel Avery, one of the most original artists on the British electronic scene, who released his groundbreaking album Ultra Truth last year, and the Anglo-German post-punk band Lebanon Hanover; synthesizer virtuoso Caterina Barbieri, who creates ecstatic emotional swirls in the House of Music Concert Hall, Colombian Lucrecia Dalt, who creates magnetic atmospheres, Extrawelt, who will be giving the world premiere of their new album, noise musician Slikback, who comes with Aphex Twin’s regular collaborator Weirdcore, and Robert Henke, who thrillingly blends contemporary aesthetics with outdated technology from 40 years ago.
Fuse, Maotik and Max Cooper, with a full-scale, three-dimensional visual art programme, and Oscar Mulero and Lewis Fautzi, representatives of techno tailored to factory buildings, will be presenting a visual and light art programme at Inota; And the home-grown acts will include artists with original ideas such as Mári Mákó, who works on her own instruments, Platon Karataev, who invite us to a folk-psychedelic post-rock trio, Iamyank, who has just released a new album, and the ever-renewing Balázs Zságer, together with Kati Katona. The list is by no means complete; for more performers check out the festival website, as we’ll be announcing the rest of the line-up soon.
And the project doesn’t stop there: INOTA’s aim is to create a professional dialogue between representatives of different artistic branches and the creative industries, which will help to create a forward-looking, ambitious vision of the potential uses of the complex at the foot of the three iconic cooling towers.
From 31st August to 3rd September, INOTA Festival will fill these spaces with the works and shows of artists and performers who revolutionise genres, push boundaries, inspire thought and plant new ideas in the minds of participants with a variety of impulses.
