Christine and the Queens will curate Meltdown 2023
The music and arts festival will run from June 9–18 at London’s Southbank Centre.
The organizers of Meltdown Festival, an avant garde music and arts festival held each year at London’s Southbank Centre, have announced Christine and the Queens as the event’s 2023 curator. Christine will join the long list of legendary artists who have picked Meltdown’s performers in the past, including Nile Rodgers, Robert Smith, M.I.A., David Byrne, Yoko Ono, Ray Davies, Ornette Coleman, Massive Attack, Jarvis Cocker, Patti Smith, Morrissey, Lee Scratch-Perry, David Bowie, Scott Walker, Nick Cave, Laurie Anderson, and Elvis Costello. This year’s festival was curated by Grace Jones, who tapped Solange, Peaches, Baaba Maal, Meshell Ndegeocello, and more as 2022’s featured acts.
Christine ushered in a new creative chapter this year with the introduction of “Christine and the Queens present Redcar,” an album series which kicked off earlier this month with Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue). In a press release, he shared the following statement on his upcoming role as Meltdown’s curator:
What an honor to be picked by the fantastical teams of the Meltdown festival to be a curator this year! It’s a tough thing to be a curator. Art wise, recently, my curating was erratic. Visceral. Sometimes regressive, back to the music I listened to when I was a teenager. A life-savior, music. One song to soothe them all. We expect from art to still save us yet we endanger it so much, everywhere. Thinking it should sell and clatter like jewels. Thinking it should be the catchiest shit in less than ten seconds when truly the birth of an emotion takes years in some people. We want it to heal it all but we deprive it of its true strength, which is eternity, a cancellation of human time. Now it’s fast, quick, a lot, and never about eternity. ’Cause eternity is death, too. It’s a cycle of ashes and birth. Over and over again.
But I digress. Do I? I will actually pick musicians that have some gut-wrenching quality, and I wish for all of us to stroll around in those ten days being rejuvenated by artistic gestures. Discoveries. The time Meltdown takes is quite exquisite; the abundance feels appropriately generous too. We need this for ourselves, art in the city, art for the citizen, collective catharsis, a wonderful purge of the soul. I hope you’ll enjoy this glorious edition, and again, long live poetry that burns and musicians crazy and brave enough to keep going — they are shaping the emotions of the future. Let’s thank them all!