The ZUS Arts and Skate Fest was founded in 2022 with the need to bring together different scenes and their actors and to offer them the opportunity to present art, performance, music and film in a public, non-commercial setting.
ZUS stands for Zusammen - bringing together, being together, designing together, working together, organising together and creating together spaces for the networking of art, music, film and skateboarding. This is also reflected in the organisation of our festival. Together as a group, made up of different subcultural areas and fields of work, a four-day programme is developed. Our organisation and working methodology are based on self-initiative and are not hierarchically conceived.
Inspired by festivals that unite art and skateboarding in urban space, such as the Vladimir Film Festival in Croatia and the Summit of the Non Aligned in Serbia, ZUS emerged from the Verein für Skateboardkultur e.V..
The places that are played are non-commercial, self-organised and cooperate with us. These include: Hallo e.V. with the Schaltzentrale (2022) and PARKS, 3001 Kino, Frappant e.V. with gallery, Kachelraum and courtyard, and the Slot in the Viktoria barracks.
Part of our philosophy is to make cultural spaces in urban space visible and accessible, which is why we largely refrain from charging admission fees.
ZUS aims to bring together the interests, contents and diversity of subcultures within the framework of the four-day festival. Thus, parallelisms and points of connection between art, culture and skateboarding in public space will be thematised in the ZUS programme items (ZUS ART, ZUS FILM, ZUS MUSIC etc.). An overarching theme for ZUS 2023 is how subcultures deal with the appropriation of space.
The lack of space is what unites all subcultures in metropolises. In Hamburg, too, there is a lack of space for uncommercial cultural projects that are not tied to institutions, where young people can try out themselves and their ideas.