Name: Virginia Mukwesha-Hetze – A Tribute to Stella Chiweshe
Start: 2023-07-13
End: 2023-07-13

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Airing Out – Open Air in the Schlüter Courtyard Live Concerts, DJ Acts

Live concerts DJ sets and cool drinks. You are cordially invited to the open-air music festival DURCHLÜFTEN - free and outside. The transcultural and cross-genre live programme presents international guests and musicians from the Berlin scene.

Let yourself be carried away by our musical parcours, which leads from Accra to Bogotá, from Belgrade to Bangkok, from Harare to Istanbul and back again to the dancefloor sounds of Berlin nightlife. On twelve summer evenings, DURCHLÜFTEN creates a space to hear and see bands that span wide musical arcs and tell diverse stories - impressive, multi-perspective and extremely danceable. Framed by the baroque façades of the Schlüterhof, the DURCHLÜFTEN festival invites music lovers of all ages, Berlin visitors and Berlin night owls to experience extraordinary music.

Curated by Melissa Perales, the programme aims to surprise with the unheard and the familiar, with sounds and rhythms that move across borders and continents.

Virginia Mukwesha-Hetze - A Tribute to Stella Chiweshe

The Queen is dead - long live the Queen! In 2021, the great Zimbabwean musician and Berliner-by-choice Stella Rambisai Chiweshe had opened the first DURCHLÜFTEN Festival. She died in early 2023 at the age of 76. To kick off the 2023 Festival, we commemorate the "Queen of the Mbira" with a musical tribute. The supernatural sound of the mbira, a traditional African plucked instrument, already enchanted the audience in 2021. In 2023, Virginia Mukwesha-Hetze, Stella Chiweshe's daughter, opens the evening together with her mother's pupils Stefan Franke, Camille Bokhobza and Fabiano Lima.

Virginia Mukwesha-Hetze has been playing mbira since she was 12 and has created her very own sound based on her mother's musical heritage. Tradition and modernity are not opposites for Virginia Mukwesha, but rather cross-fertilise each other. For example, she fuses current Jiti rhythms from South Africa with traditional Shona melodies or writes new pieces for mbira.

Stella Rambisai Chiweshe and the Mbira

The mbira is a traditional plucked instrument of the Shona people in Zimbabwe, which has been played almost exclusively by men for thousands of years. Stella Chiweshe elicited sounds of breathtaking beauty and depth from the metal reeds of this relatively small instrument.

The metal of the tongues was originally extracted from the mountains that also housed the deceased leaders of the Shona. The tongues thus embody the presence of these powerful ancestors. In the traditional religion of the Shona, nightly ceremonies are held in which the mbira helps to contact the spirits of the ancestors by putting the tribe members into a trance.

Stella Rambisai Chiweshe first learned the instrument secretly at a young age, as it was traditionally not accessible to women. She later became one of the most internationally recognised players and ambassadors of her people. She gave Mbira concerts internationally, among others in the Palace of the Republic in Berlin in 1988.

Line Up DURCHLÜFTEN - Open Air at the Schlüterhof

- Free admission

- Wheelchair accessible

- Venue: Schlüterhof

- Belongs to: Durchlüften - Open Air at the Schlüterhof

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