Kollektiv UNRUHE, the 13 member Berlin-based composer-performer collective, explores the unstable spaces that appear when roles are shared and hierarchies removed.
With UNRUHE, you never know what to expect. With an emphasis on experimenting with unconventional concert formats, UNRUHE collaboratively curates, creates and performs new music, often involving co-composition, multimedia, staging and improvisation. With every concert, the group takes a risk and asks: what arises when multiple personalities create together?
Founded in 2021, the international constellation of musicians embrace their eclectic instrumentation, plural voice, and heterogeneous sonic identity: from lyrical, sensitive and fragile to humorous, messy and wild, its sound world is a sonification of the social. Its sound reflects its members' personalities and their manifold relationships, speaking to audiences from a variety of backgrounds.
"The collective considers diversity to be a strength. Working together is about valuing differences and valuing each other’s nonconformities"
– Prof. Dr. Ivo I. Berg, INMM Darmstadt
From this foundation, the collective has embarked on ambitious productions such as GACHA MANIA (a concert length multimedia show and collaboration with Bernat Pont Anglanda as part of the JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste Berlin, 2026), SPELL and NOT FOUND (collective compositions composed by UNRUHE, commissioned by Klangwerkstatt Berlin, 2025 & 2023), ANTIPODES (a collaboration and international tour with Ensemble Orbis, 2024) amidst others.
The collective has collaborated with composers such as Óscar Escudero, Beniamino Fiorini, Daphné Hejebri, Mert Moralı and Sara Stefanović, and to date it has performed 46 world premieres of repertoire written for the collective in a wide range of contexts, from educational to international. The collective has performed in a number of concerts locally in Berlin and has been invited to perform at festivals such as rainy days (Luxembourg), Transparent Sound Festival (Budapest), 2k+ Antifestival (Novi Sad) impuls (Graz), and Klangwerkstatt Berlin.
The group has offered educational workshops at the Landesjugendensemble Berlin, the Musikakademie Rheinsberg and impuls Graz. In the 2024/25 season, the ensemble was the resident ensemble of the Musikakademie Rheinsberg. In 2025, UNRUHE received a #MusikerZukunft stipendium from the Deutscher Musikrat for the project ‘GACHA MANIA’.
Moving into the future, Kollektiv UNRUHE strives to maintain the ethos established at its very beginning: to be a space where creative risk tasking is valued, in which collective practice and individual artistic voices can thrive together.
Kollektiv UNRUHE is supported by InSzene (2026-2027, Podium Gegenwart | Deutscher Musikrat) and the Berlin Senatverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt
2026-2027