Christine and The Queens announced as Meltdown Festival curators for 2023
Christine and The Queens has been announced as the curator for London’s Meltdown Festival in 2023.
Chris is in good company as a curator of the arts festival, as previous artists to have held this position include The Cure frontman Robert Smith, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, and David Byrne. The line-up for the event is yet to be revealed; however, it’s been announced Meltdown will run from June 9th-18th at the legendary Southbank Centre.
Chris commented: “What an honour 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 it’s 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.”
The ‘Tilted’ singer passionately added: “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!”
Mark Ball, Artistic Director at the Southbank Centre, said: “Meltdown not only allows us to understand the passions of an artist, but uniquely to see them come to life as a fully-formed festival across the Southbank. And to get inside Chris’s imagination – an artist whose ideas and inspiration comes from his politics, his history and identity, his love of theatricality and of transgressive underground culture – will be an incredible musical treat for audiences.”
Earlier this year, Chris, who recently released his new album, Redcar les adorables étoiles, revealed, “I’ve been a man for a year now” on a TikTok video.
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