Turning its focus toward improvisation, intuition, interaction, and inspiration, Sacrum Profanum Festival embraces four ideas that shape both the artistic process and the way audiences experience each event. “Instead of events or concerts, we want to create experiences that go beyond music. We focus on nature, memory, presence, self-care and, above all, time”, says the Festival’s Artistic Director, Krzysztof Pietraszewski, describing this shift as an invitation to move beyond the familiar.
November 6–11 marked the 23rd edition of the Sacrum Profanum, one of Krakow’s most thought-provoking celebrations of contemporary music and art. As such, the 2025 programme continued the festival’s tradition of redefining what a festival can be. Music enters into dialogue with performance, literature, visual arts, and public space through a series of site-specific projects that encourage participation and reflection. From the early-morning landscapes surrounding Krakus Mound to the city’s industrial interiors, each location becomes an active part of the composition.
“It’s a gesture of freedom, but also of attentiveness and openness to others. We try not to value one aspect over another. It’s about awareness of sound, of presence, of the people around us”.
— Krzysztof Pietraszewski
The focal point of this year’s edition was Konrad Smoleński’s monumental sound installation Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More – a resonant field of bronze bells and speaker walls that first represented Poland at the Venice Biennale in 2013. Throughout the festival, it became a meeting ground for Instaimprovisations: daily sessions bringing together artists and improvisers who had never performed together before. Among them were Marek Pospieszalski (this year’s resident artist), Jérôme Noetinger, Colin Webster, Marshall Trammell, Mariam Rezaei, Jakob Kullberg, Cath Roberts, Guilhem Lacroux, Maja Ratkje, and Yann Gourdon.
Improvisation here is more than a musical technique. As Pietraszewski notes, it is also a way of thinking about human connection: “It’s a gesture of freedom, but also of attentiveness and openness to others. We try not to value one aspect over another. It’s about awareness of sound, of presence, of the people around us”.
The Voice of Poetry
Several events explored how sound can attune us to what already surrounds us. New Origins by Stephen O’Malley, performed twice, at dawn and dusk near Krakus Mound and Krakow’s Błonia meadows, invited the audience to contemplate the sounds of the city, the rustle of nature and the slow rhythm of daylight. “It’s an opportunity to notice something we already have, without needing a concert for it. To listen to the world waking up”, Pietraszewski explains.
Memory, too, was a recurring motif. Smoleński’s installation revisited the symbolic power of bells – their resonance and meaning gradually dissolving, questioning what our cultural symbols still hold. In another project, Marshall Trammell and a group of students explored social and historical memory through performance, confronting what stories are remembered, forgotten or reimagined through sound.
But this year’s edition drew from literature, too. Poetry by Maja Ratkje, Czesław Miłosz, Shakespeare, and Ezra Pound becomes a source of inspiration and reflection. For Pietraszewski, these texts are not simply decorative; they challenge interpretation and provoke dialogue. “Some of these poems may sound difficult today, even troubling. That’s exactly why we include them. To ask how meaning changes over time and what these voices still tell us”.
The connection between music and poetry, he says, is one of mutual curiosity rather than competition. “They complement each other. They’re two different ways of speaking about the same things”.
Toward New Forms of Experience
Sacrum Profanum has long questioned the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between the academic and the independent, between listening and participating. Since its founding in 2003, the festival has evolved from a presentation of classical repertoire to a space of experimentation where genres blur and new forms emerge.
For Pietraszewski, replacing the traditional notion of a concert with the idea of an experience is essential. “We’re trying to propose new formats”, he says. “Sometimes even the journey to the site – the walk up the hill, the early hour, the chill in the air – is already part of the event. To call it a concert would be too narrow. What we want is for people to experience something. Reflect, be present, and perhaps see the world a little differently”.
“Sacrum Profanum has long questioned the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between the academic and the independent, between listening and participating.”
Among this year’s highlights are the Sacrum Profanum House Party performance at Hevre, family and educational workshops, and a series of collaborative performances that merge sound, movement and text. Each project, in its own way, redefines the act of listening as a form of awareness, an art of being present.
As always, Sacrum Profanum refuses to draw clear lines between high and low, academic and experimental, the known and the unknown. It remains a festival of creative encounters where the sacred meets the profane, and where, through improvisation and intuition, new forms of meaning emerge.
“Art”, Pietraszewski reflects, “is one of the few spaces that escapes algorithms and fixed patterns. It’s where freedom begins. Where we can stop, think differently and look at the world anew”.
