Qualla: Fusion Festival

Fusion Festival: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Hmorisse assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The festival writes its own name in Cyrillic. On the posters and the stage banners it appears as Fuzion, in the alphabet of an army that left in the 1990s, and the reason is painted on the walls: when Kulturkosmos took over the airfield at Larz in 1997, Soviet lettering was still legible inside the grass-covered hangars. Rather than scrub it off, they adopted it. Nearly thirty years later the hangars are dance floors, the taxiways are footpaths, and most summers around seventy thousand people arrive for four to six days of what the organisers cheerfully describe as Ferienkommunismus, holiday communism, on a piece of ground built to test weapons.

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Hmorisse assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fusion Festival: The Field Before the Festival

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JoachimKohler-HB, CC BY-SA 4.0. The German Empire bought this flat, sandy stretch of Mecklenburg in 1916 as a research and training ground for aviation, and opened it to the air service in August 1918. After the Luftwaffe was founded in 1935 it became part of the Rechlin complex, the Reich's central aircraft te...

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Image: JoachimKohler-HB | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fusion Festival: No Lineup, No Sponsors, No Advertising

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kerospam, CC BY-SA 4.0. Fusion is defined as much by what it refuses as by what it offers. The lineup is not published in advance, so nobody can buy a ticket for a particular headliner. There are no major sponsors and no advertising hoardings. Since 2012 tickets have been allocated by lottery rather tha...

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Image: Kerospam | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fusion Festival: Holiday Communism

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit San Andreas, CC BY-SA 4.0. The phrase is the organisers' own, and it is only half a joke. The aim is a temporary autonomous zone: a few days in which the ordinary machinery of work, rent and status is switched off and something else is tried in its place. Foreign observers reach for the comparison with Bur...

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Image: San Andreas | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fusion Festival: The Summer the Police Wanted a Station

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Hmorisse assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2019 the arrangement that had held for two decades came apart in public. Police in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern demanded a permanent station inside the festival grounds, along with riot vehicles and water cannon on standby. Kulturkosmos refused, arguing that a self-governing space c...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Hmorisse assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fusion Festival: What It Costs to Keep Going

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Hmorisse assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The 2020 festival was cancelled outright. In 2021 the main event was called off again, replaced by three smaller gatherings of about ten thousand people each in August and September under the name Plan:et C. The return in 2022 drew sixty-seven thousand and left the organisation w...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Hmorisse assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0