WHOLE Festival was born from the brightest minds on Berlin’s electronic music circuit in 2017 with two key principles: good sound, and providing a utopian home for queer party-goers. Seven years later, and now billed as the world’s biggest queer electronic music festival – it seems they succeeded on both fronts.
This year, the lineup is spread across five immersive environments located within Germany’s Ferropolis inland peninsula – the high-octane techno ARENA, the sun-soaked grooves of BEACH, the hypnotic DJ sets of FOREST, the bass-heavy CRANE, and the hypnagogic AMBIENT. Spread across each of these stages are a range of sonics, including Brazilian funk powerhouse BADSISTA, champion of East Asian rhythms Ahadadream, Mancunian techno duo Blasha & Allat, and more.
Having remained staunchly political since its inception – a quality inseparable from the Berlin dance culture in which it was birthed – the festival also features a range of talks and workshops designed to respond to the current backsliding on queer rights in many countries and ongoing geopolitical instability. Specialist speakers in the fields of music, sex, and gender will be accompanied by workshops centring on screenprinting, massage and life drawing curated in collaboration with London queer pleasure collective HOWL.
Last year, Dazed Clubber Alexander Ekholm captured these sweat-soaked images of the jam-packed lineup, and this year we’re looking to do it again. To be in for a chance for your photographs of the festival to be featured on the Dazed site, post your best event photograph on the Dazed Club app as a project with the title ‘WHOLE FESTIVAL’, along with a link to your website and Instagram.
The successful applicant will receive two tickets to the festival, and will be paid. Deadline is July 4.
Join the Dazed Club creative community here.