Secret Element of Combustion — On Affect, Energy, and the Tensions of the Contemporary

From August 6–9, 2026, the next edition of the Sanatorium of Sound festival will take place in Sokołowsko. For the past 12 years, the festival has been organized by In Situ Contemporary Art Foundation and is one of Europe’s most important events dedicated to experimental music, sound art, and performative practices. This year’s edition will be held under the title “Secret Element of Combustion.”

The main theme focuses on the concept of affect, understood as an impulse capable of triggering intense emotional, social, and cultural processes. The “Secret Element of Combustion” becomes a metaphor for a small charge which — although often almost invisible—can lead to the eruption of tensions, transformations, and liminal states. The festival programme reflects on contemporary reality functioning in a state of permanent stimulation, accumulating tension, and continuous existence on the verge of release.

Today’s world increasingly reveals that emotions have become one of the fundamental resources of contemporary social, political, and economic systems. Affects are managed, reproduced, and processed by media, technologies, and communication algorithms, becoming the fuel for collective reactions, tensions, and divisions. Sanatorium of Sound attempts to translate these processes into the language of sound, performance, and embodied experience.

— “We are interested in the moment when passions heat up to the point of ignition, tensions build to the limits of burnout, and the glow becomes the driving force of a breakthrough. This moment of transition does not have to lead to a resolution, but it always leaves a trace. This year’s programme focuses on works that treat sound not as an illustration of emotion, but as a real force acting upon the body, perception, and space. The intensity of these practices meets the audience’s reception—with its readiness, tension, and hunger for experience. The audience is not merely an addressee here: through its emotional and physical state it fuels and inspires the artists,” says Robert Piotrowicz, Artistic Director of the festival.

An important conceptual context of this edition remains a reflection on excess energy and its expenditure—on the ways in which individuals and communities burn themselves out in the intensity of their own desires, fears, and tensions. This is not, however, an affirmation of destruction or a romanticization of crisis. Rather, “Secret Element of Combustion” describes a critical point at which a charge of affects, finding no outlet, comes dangerously close to spontaneous ignition.

The festival programme is created by artists representing various strategies of working with intensity, corporeality, and the materiality of sound. This is not a constellation operating within a single aesthetic, but a multidimensional map of practices in which sound becomes a space of experience—physical, technological, and social. The concerts, performances, and installations of this edition treat sound not only as an artistic form, but as an event: a situation in which body, space, time, and audience are drawn into a field of shared tension.

One of the central points of the programme will be a performance by Robin Fox, whose immersive works employing light, lasers, and sound redefine the relationship between space and perception. His works create environments in which the audience finds itself directly inside a field of frequencies, movement, and tension.

The programme will also feature Rashad Becker, whose work redefines contemporary thinking about synthesis and sound structure. Becker treats technology not as a tool for effect, but as a medium for organizing tension, space, and sonic intensity.

A special event of the festival will be the presentation of GAMUT INC, a collective known for its work with computer-controlled pipe organs. The artists redefine the historical sacred instrument as a contemporary system of algorithmic articulation, moving the organ into the realm of a new physicality of sound and architectural precision.

Specifically for this project, we have separated Guro Moe and Håvard Skaset, who usually work as a duo. They will present their highly charged artistic identities in solo performances. We will devote particular attention to the intensity of these two exceptional artists, whose primary tools are passion, energy, and the space through which they work.

An important element of this edition will also be the project of Miłosz Kędra, who uses a self-constructed portative—a portable organ instrument functioning outside both sacred and institutional contexts.

The energy of repetition, trance, and the physical intensity of sound will be brought by Artur Rumiński, while the work of Elvin Brandhi will expand the programme into the territories of voice, performance, language, and the embodied expression of sound.

Sanatorium of Sound 2026 does not propose a single dominant aesthetic. What unites the invited artists, however, is a shared engagement with intensity—synthetic, instrumental, corporeal, and social. The festival thus becomes a laboratory of tensions in which sound does not serve solely an aesthetic function but becomes a tool for activating and recognizing contemporary emotional, perceptual, and existential states.

The programme will once again be realized in collaboration with Katowice Sound Office, with whom a joint programme dedicated to experimental sound practices and contemporary forms of music presentation has been developed over many years. This year’s strand will include concerts, performances, and discussion panels.

A separate part of the programme will consist of a series of events commemorating Gerard Lebik, the acclaimed musician, sound artist, and long-time festival curator who passed away at the end of last year. These events will focus on Lebik’s recorded output and will also attempt to problematize the ways in which the co-creator of Sanatorium of Sound listened to the world around him.

The festival will also feature: Aya Metwalli, LOUFR, Nur, Qba Janicki, softchaos, Sonar System, wræżlivøść (Kamil Piotrowicz) x Tymek Papior, Zofia Hołubowska, Michał Jurgielewicz, Sholto Dobie, PLK, Daniel Muzyczuk, Olga Drenda, Przemysław Wielgosz, and Paweł Szroniak. Their practices will enrich the programme with new perspectives related to experimental forms of composition, improvisation, performance, sound art, audiovisual practices, and critical discussion.