WATER AND SOUND

25.7.- 2.8.2026 | Festival for global music | art | performance | panels

“A powerful rush of water and music that opens Augsburg to the world.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

For one week, the Water & Sound Festival 2025 created a vibrant meeting place for music, art and dialog in Augsburg. Under the motto “Rivers”, artists from all over the world focused on rivers as cultural and spiritual lifelines – as sources of stories, myths, music and ecological perspectives.
The opening in the Parktheater began with a keynote speech by Dilip Da Cunha, who rethought rivers as cultural constructs. The American singer Sheherazaad then took her audience on a musical journey of her Indian ancestors – carried by her expressive voice, fine instrumental textures and charismatic stage presence. The Neue Szene wrote: “With warm Hindi and Urdu vocals and a genre-spanning collection of wistful and subtly unsettling songs […] she completely captivates us. From song to song, the intensity and the musical exchange of blows increases and the audience celebrates her and her band enthusiastically. There could not be a more glamorous start […].” Afterwards, Karolina Cicha and Patrycja Betley, together with Didem Başar and the Water & Sound Ensemble, spanned an arc of sound from the Vistula to the Euphrates and Ganges. The Augsburger Allgemeine raved about music that “sometimes flows like an exuberant spring brook, sometimes like a deliberate, majestic river” – hypnotic, intense and full of energy.At Kuhsee, “Innermost River” combined water, dance and electro-acoustic sounds to create a sensual, almost meditative experience. Immediately afterwards, Kin’Gongolo Kiniata heated things up with Afropop, punk and home-made recycled instruments. Further highlights followed in the Annahof: the Catalan duo Tarta Relena with archaic, futuristic vocal art, Ana Frango Elétrico from Rio with danceable grooves between bossa nova, funk and indie pop, and Aïta Mon Amour with a powerful homage to North African traditions.
The “Riverbirds” project brought handmade clay figures made from Tunisian river clay across the Stempflebach stream into the city – and created a poetic moment in the Siebentischwald forest with numerous audience participants. Panels and discourse formats shed light on river rights, ecology and water as cultural memory; the film “River” took the audience on a journey along the world’s great rivers with breathtaking images. Guided tours led to power plants, canals, the historic drinking water plant at Hochablass and through the Siebentischwald forest – and made the UNESCO World Heritage sites of the Augsburg water management system tangible.
Under the artistic direction of Girisha Fernando, water became a resonating space for art and music – with bridges to science, in an interdisciplinary dialog across continents and generations. Sensual, socio-political, communal. Or, as the Augsburger Allgemeine described it at the end in the Annahof:“Captivating and original, inescapably danceable thanks to pure positive vibes.”

The program for Water & Sound 2026 will be announced in spring.