T31 FESTIVAL

T31 was Tresor's first large-scale production after two years of pandemic lockdowns. After a soft reopening in May, Tresor set its sights on T31, developing a mammoth seven-week production to reassert the institution's relevance without reducing a thirty-year legacy to commemoration. The club's 30th anniversary had passed in closure, marked by a limited-edition book, True Stories; a compilation bringing together 52 essential tracks, both classics and exclusive commissions; and an online broadcast in partnership with ARTE, featuring eight concerts staged in previously unseen areas of the Kraftwerk building. T31 was the first chance to celebrate in a physical space, and to do it in a way that argued for Tresor's future rather than simply honouring its past.

As Lead Curator, I held final authority over the full seven-week music programme, including headline concerts and every production budget. I built T31 as a long-form cultural system rather than a run of standalone nights, tracing techno's lineage from Detroit through to its contemporary reinterpretation across club and live performance. A skeleton team returning from lockdown was faced with a continent-wide aviation crisis, so I developed logistical failsafe measures for delays and cancellations. The first line of defence was an artist travel schedule with large time-windows, allowing alternate routing to be arranged in the event of a cancellation or delay. A small roster of local artists was notified to be on standby should an artist be unable to perform. With roughly 50% of the 287 performing artists travelling to Berlin, only one artist was unable to perform due to travel disruption.

Another major operational decision came when faced with a production schedule of seven consecutive concerts hosted on the 2,500-capacity main stage of Kraftwerk. I authored the reduction of these large-scale shows to three: opening, middle and closing milestones, and was able to operate my teams productively by trading headline density for delivery quality.

Roughly 50,000 guests came through across the seven weeks. Der Tagesspiegel and other German press reframed Tresor as a living institution rather than a legacy site. The booking identity and production structures we built for T31 carried directly into 2023. The outcome of the project led to my role at Tresor expanding from Lead Curator into Creative Director, adding social strategy, partnerships and territory expansion to my mandate.

I applied how I think about scale and narrative from Berlin Atonal to T31. The density of the programme proved the institution could still command attention, but it also showed the limits of complexity for a public audience. Rebuilt today, it would be more reductive and legible, allowing audiences to stay engaged in the world-building we are presenting rather than getting lost in volume.