Upcoming: April 18th 2026
Kickoff for Money Laundering 2026 – invitation to the cellar
1 PM
3 PM
5 PM
In front of the appartment building
Großbeerenstraße 20
10963 Berlin / Kreuzberg
Projects
February 11th 2024
Flashmob/Intervention #2 at Humboldt-Forum Berlin
Second attempt. Unannounced, quiet intervention in the interactive exhibition Berlin Global. For several hours, we repeatedly walked through the same doors of the exhibition rooms, triggering small sounds. The doors are labelled with seemingly mutually exclusive statements ‘I want to dare change’ versus ‘I want to protect what we have’. You always have to choose one of two options in the exhibition. DETOX cannot decide in this pointed, binary way. So we were always going back and forth, forwards and backwards, together and alone, without a solution. 98% despair, 2% humour.
Photo: Anton Vasilyev
Photo: Anton Vasilyev
2023: Concept Money Laundering, published in positionen
Money secures domination. Money is anonymous and abstract. Historically, this link between power and quantifiability has changed the world. Money can be accumulated infinitely, unlike commodities or labor services. Money thus made way for injustice on a new scale and continues to secure it today.
Anthropologist David Graeber points out that money is trivialized. He shows that the common narrative of the emergence of money as a simplification of barter falls far short. He demonstrates that the invention of money is essentially about financing wars.
In global capital flows, money symbolically carries every previous transaction. It bears traces of wars, arms exports and slavery. All who use money are implicated – even those who benefit only indirectly from global transactions, in the form of art grants and salaries. No one can locate themselves outside of global connections, even if the comfort of living in a rich country obscures those connections.
Art is a money-laundering machine: money with a long transaction history is fed into the art system and may come out cleaner. Even in a comparatively well-functioning democracy, arms exports to civil war zones and art coexist – with the latter providing basic hygiene.
In the artistic action of money laundering, the artists expose their own entanglement in global capital flows, address their own participation in the perpetuation of global injustice. The project is a symbolic act, 98% desperate and 2% funny. Washing attempts to strip money of its anonymity and remove the patina of oblivion.
Depending on the occasion, new forms and formats are always sought. The first realization of this idea took place in 2019 as an ensemble piece in the Berlin scene of contemporary music theater. The ensemble MaNN AUS OBST#5, at that time consisting of Anton Vasilyev, Edith Steyer, Laia RiCa, Maja von Kriegstein and Wieland Möller elaborated an evening in which elements of sound installation, improvised music and post-dramatic theater were assembled into a plaintive-comic-absurd wash factory. In the characters of the participants, GDR history, revolution in El Salvador and a mid-level position at a German university, improvised music as an often underfunded and new music as the most publicly funded branch of modern art met. The shared longing for an alternative to individualism and turbo-capitalism with simultaneous great diversity of political backgrounds, musical languages and working methods became a productive challenge.
Now Maja vK and Anton X are taking up the idea again as Team Detox and turning it into a long-term project. Money Laundering is designed as an ongoing series of events, the parts of which can take place at different locations. Depending on the occasion and the client, the form of these actions varies: Performance, sound installation, conceptual art, concert, flash mob.
published in February 2023 in
Positionen. Texte zur aktuellen Musik.
January 13th 2024
Flashmob/Intervention #1 at Humboldt Forum Berlin
Unannounced, quiet intervention in the interactive exhibition Berlin Global. For several hours, we repeatedly walked through the same doors of the exhibition rooms, triggering small sounds. The doors are labelled with seemingly mutually exclusive statements ‘I want to dare change’ versus ‘I want to protect what we have’. You always have to choose one of two options in the exhibition. DETOX cannot decide in this pointed, binary way. So we were always going back and forth, forwards and backwards, together and alone, without a solution. 98% despair, 2% humour.
Photos: DETOX
Video: Anton Vasilyev
December 11th 2023
performance intervention at KaDeWe Berlin
MITSPIELEN (PLAY ALONG) – Performance Intervention in the public space infront of KaDeWE Berlin
Unannounced intervention in public space. Christmas jazz, sometimes pop, trickles from the loudspeakers above the shop windows of KaDeWe in Berlin Schöneberg. DETOX played along quietly. Maja with the trumpet, Anton with a blackboard on which he writes everything that we as participants in Western consumer societies are involved in: ever more oil drilling in the Amazon region, violence at Europe’s external borders, thousands of deaths in Gaza, the rise of right-wing radicalism. We have no solution either. We play along. 98% desperation, 2% humour.
Photo: Clio van Aerde
Photo: Clio van Aerde
Abuse of power / Populism / Global inequality / Slavery / Colonialism / 2 degrees Celsius / 700 people in a boat / Modern slavery / Gaza / Rwanda deal / Jin Jiyan Azadî / CO2 / Afghanistan / Lampedusa / “Green Tech” – cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo / 25% AfD / Corruption / LGBT in Russia / Oil drilling in the Amazon / Right-wing world / Arms industry / Moria / Data theft / Lobbyism / Rheinmetall / Fossil fuels / things we don’t even know / Heckler & Koch / Exploitation / TAKING PART / BEING ENTANGLED
November 11th 2023
intervention during music 21 festival Hannover
Performance at Festival Musik 21 “Kipppunkte” during the concert of Ensemble Mosaik, performing Antons piece “Camp Linden Nord”
DETOX at Musik 21 in Hanover. During the premiere of Anton’s composition ‘Camp Linden Nord’ at the ensemble mosaik concert, Maja cleaned Anton’s fee with a toothbrush. After about 120 minutes, she has made one side of a coin a little cleaner. 98% despair, 2% humour.
October 9th 2023
concert/performance @4bid gallery Amsterdam
Concert/Performance @ 4bid gallery Amsterdam
Photo: Lisa Hofmann
Photo: Anton X
DETOX on tour as a duo. Improvised music and performance in a gallery in Amsterdam. For about an hour we played instruments wired together in a complex setup, and resonators made of everyday objects connected via transducers. The control over the sounds lied somewhere between us and the machines. The evening began with the sound of coin-scrubbing toothbrushes from a rubbish bin in the gallery courtyard, and ended after the entire electronic amplification failed towards the end of the performance, as a duo of bamboo flute from a market in Bangalore with an unamplified electric guitar. 98% despair, 2% humour.
Followed by an exciting and inspiring audience discussion.
September 10th and 11th 2023
Music / Performance @ AckerStadtPalast Berlin
Live Musik / Performance @ AckerStadtPalast Berlin
Guests:
QiQi Zheng – dance, contorsion & performance art (sunday)
Wieland Möller – drumset & performance (monday)
Funded by Musikfonds
Photo: Detox
On two consecutive evenings, DETOX was laundering their first public funding from the Musikfonds – on one evening supported by the performance artist, vogue dancer and contortionist QiQi Zheng, on the other by the drummer and performer Wieland Möller. On an off-stage in Berlin, we tried to wring poetry out of a pile of urban rubbish to constructively network ourselves and our instruments, to publicly search for new forms of co-operation and shared control over the whole. Scraps of a jazz band, singing rubbish bins, a body whose contortions simultaneously point to its entanglement in global dynamics, and express the longing to somehow wriggle out of them. 98% despair, 2% humour.
11th of August 2023
Musik/Performance/Lesung online from ísafjörður (IS) and Berlin
Music/performance/lecture online. Washing happening simultaneously from Berlin (Germany) and ísafjörður (Iceland).
DETOX non-stop. Money is laundered even at the height of summer. In a Zoom call, we read from our summer reading programme from different ends of Europe. It’s about friendship, debt, resonance and capital in the 21st century. In between, we tried to launder a cent by transferring it back and forth online and making the resulting internet traffic audible to the guests through sonification. 98% desperation, 2% humour.
Bibliography
Various authors of the South African online newspaper THE CONTINENT
David Graeber: Debt – the first 5000 years
Thomas Piketty: Capital in the 21st century
Hannah Arendt: Friendship in dark times
11th of July 2023
Music/performance in the power cellar of a tenement house.
Music/performance in the in the power cellar of a Kreuzberg tenement house.
An intervention in public space that you can watch from the street.
Followed by a bonfire in the yard.
Photo Ivan Mrsic
Fourth DETOX – cellar wash cycle. We opened the normally rather hidden basement of our apartment building in Berlin Kreuzberg to the street and used it as a metaphor for invisible entanglement, complexity and opacity. Musically, we worked with a wide range of electronic and acoustic instruments, which are electronically amplified via transducers with cleaning buckets positioned on the street. Individual moments of this washing process were by now routine, listening to our own four walls via microphone and feedback, working with text snippets from the South African newspaper, THE CONTINENT, and another recorder solo dedicated to whistleblowers, possibly only 1% funny and 99% desperate.
11th of June 2023
Music/performance in the power cellar of a tenement house
The third performance in the basement of our building.
An intervention into the public space, that can be followed from the street.
98% desperation, 2% wit.
Photo: Maja von Kriegstein
Photo: Anton Vasilyev
Third DETOX basement concert. For our wash cycle in June, we once again used the basement of our house in Berlin Kreuzberg. We opened up the normally hidden basement of the house to the street and used it as a metaphor for invisible entanglement, complexity and opacity. Musically, again working with a large selection of electronic and acoustic instruments, that are electronically amplified via transducers with cleaning buckets positioned on the street. Individual moments of this wash included listening to our own four walls via microphone and feedback, working with snippets of text from the South African newspaper, THE CONTINENT, and a recorder solo dedicated to Julian Assange that was 98% desperate and 2% funny.
May 11th, 2023
Online-Performance from Arnhem (NL) and Berlin
An online performance on zoom.
DETOX takes the educational mission of art seriously. In a Zoom call, hosted simultaneously from an art academy in the Netherlands and the Berlin home base, we read from one of DETOX’s basic theoretical texts – David Graeber’s ‘Debt, the first 5000 years’. We also discussed our previous washing methods and tested Anton’s new online transfer sonificator in public for the first time. Towards the end, Maja’s revolutionary etude on the Steinway, as well as the entire event, is were taken out of our hands by China. 98% desperation 2% humour.
Video: Anton X
Performance Still: Detox
Photo: Karolina Rupp
Apr 11th, 2023
Music/performance in the power cellar of a tenement house
DETOX in the basement for the second time. For our washing cycle in April, we once again used the basement of our apartment block in Berlin Kreuzberg, which is open to the street. It’s a rarely entered, rather hidden place – it’s also where the electricity meters for the whole house are located. The room thus becomes a kind of control centre. We used it as a metaphor for invisible entanglement, complexity and opacity. Musically, this time we used a very lean setup of a few washing sounds that are electronically amplified via transducers with cleaning buckets positioned on the street. In this wash cycle, the focus was on listening to one’s own four walls via microphone and feedback. 98% despair, 2% humour.
Photo: Vinicius Giusti
Photo: Vinicius Giusti
March 26th 2023
performance/intervention at festival Maerz Musik
MaerzMusik festival at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, 2023.
Release party for issue #134 “MoneyMustBeFunny SPECIAL” of the magazine positionen – Texte zur aktuellen Musik in the MaerzMusik Library.
DETOX, as the team of authors of an article in this issue, earned €50 and is now on site to launder it.
98% despair, 2% wit.
Photo: Vinicius Giusti
Mar 11th 2023
Music/performance in the power cellar of a tenement house.
Video: Vinicius Giust / Anton X
DETOX in the grey area between private and public. For our wash cycle in March, we used a basement room in our apartment block in Berlin Kreuzberg that is open to the street. It’s a rarely entered, rather hidden place – it’s also where the electricity meters for the whole house are located. The room thus becomes a kind of control centre. In this wash cycle, we used it as a metaphor for invisible entanglement, complexity and opacity. Musically, we used a large setup of various electronic and acoustic instruments, which were electronically amplified via transducers with cleaning buckets standing in the street. This allowed us to reach both invited audiences and random passers-by. It was not entirely clear whether the coffee we serve on the street, which was still pretty cold in Berlin in March, had been used as washing water before. Probably yes. And we simply drank all the money-dirt back into ourselves. 98% desperation, 2% humour.
Photo: Vinicius Giusti
Feb. 11, 2023
Video Snippet - Money Laundering on Social Media
One ruble one euro
Video snippet on social media
Video: Detox
As the first of the monthly launderings, we published a mini-video on social media. It shows the central symbolic act of the money laundering project: four hands try to scour two coins with two toothbrushes. DETOX. 98% desperation, 2% humour.
February 2023
publication in positionen – texts on contemporary music
February 2023 / Publication in positionen – Texts on Contemporary Music
DETOX as a team of authors. As a prelude to the monthly performances and as a documentation of previous money laundering works, we are writing an article for the magazine positionen – Texte zur Neuen Musik. We announce that from now on we will draw attention, once a month, to our own and the general entanglement in global capital flows by laundering our money. 98% desperation, 2% humour.
Money Laundering
A text in Positionen. Texte zur aktuellen Musik. (Positionen. Texts on contemporary music.)
Photo: Positionen