A few weeks before it all begins, Chess Club and AKA Studios post a cryptic teaser for a festival on Instagram. The image looks like a lost frame from Woodstock ’69: analog photography, naked bodies tangled in a riverbed. It feels nostalgic, almost dreamlike, yet urgent. A quiet promise of something unpolished, collective, and intimate.

96 Hours of Summer is a four-day art festival across two contrasting venues in Hamburg. It is a collaboration between two local art collectives, Chess Club and AKA Studios, who have each carved out a unique place in the city’s cultural underground. Together, they create a fleeting but powerful moment of artistic convergence, a soft landing and a loud echo.

Chess Club, founded in 2020 by Amanda Weimer, has developed into a project space with a curatorial language grounded in emotion, spirituality, vulnerability, sound, and friendship. Exhibitions, readings, performances, screenings, and small publications blend together into an emotional topography shaped by both local and international artists. Its current location, a former American Boots store on Hamburg’s historic Colonnaden, exists somewhere between post-minimalist boutique and urban relic. 96 Hours of Summer also marks Chess Club’s final exhibition in this space before relocating.

Meanwhile, AKA Studios, founded by Noemi Liv Nicolaisen and Mia Lotta Joedecke, brings scale and edge to the table. Located in a semi-abandoned warehouse in Hammerbrook, an industrial zone on the outskirts of Hamburg, the space becomes the raw and cavernous heart of the festival. Dust-covered floors, crumbling plaster, steel beams, and massive windows give the building a brutal, romantic kind of beauty. It is loud, tactile, and fully ready to hold sound, bodies, light, and tension.

The festival opens quietly on a Thursday night with a group show at Chess Club. Artists like British photographer Callum Hansen and one of Hamburg’s legends Nozomi Ngceni present works in a setting that feels somewhere between a former jeweler’s salon and a forgotten designer showroom. The mood is unhurried. Visitors spill onto the street outside, drinking beers, talking in soft clusters, while a DJ soundtracks the warm evening air.

Friday is the festival’s peak. At AKA Studios, crews work throughout the day to finish building and installing. By 7 p.m. the warehouse has transformed into a temporary museum, with installations, paintings, video works, and performances scattered across the industrial hall. In a side room a sculptural steel stage rises like a relic from a post-apocalyptic opera. It is the work of Berlin-based artist Hannah Stewart, co-founder of TOR Studios. Although it looks like a centerpiece, the performances do not take place on the stage itself at least that night. Instead, they unfold around it, fluid, ambient, and without introduction.

As night falls over Hammerbrook, the halls of AKA begin to hum with quiet anticipation. The late-summer air clings to the skin. People gather in loose groups, leaning against tall windows, smoking, or pausing mid-step as if caught by an invisible current. A low murmur runs through the space, conspiratorial and unhurried. It is the kind of energy that suggests something is about to unfold.

From a dimly lit backroom at AKA, a shaft of light cuts through the shadows. Callum Hansen’s film Memorial Rounds (2024) flickers across the cracked walls, unfolding like a raw, first-person video diary. Scenes of skull-shaped bongs, drifting cars, and playful scuffles merge into a visceral portrayal of adolescent intensity. The DIY aesthetic and unfiltered emotion resonate deeply with the gritty surroundings. The film feels like a rebellious, romanticized coming-of-age music video, an anti-hero’s anthem captured in fragmented moments. Meanwhile, two pianists quietly perform Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, weaving classical melancholy through the youthful chaos. Beethoven, a figure far removed from modern youth culture, might well have been the proto-rockstar of his day, prompting a curious thought about what the “coke” of the 17th century might have been.

Near the entrance a striking pop-art-inspired painting by Australian artist Zach Rockman demands attention. Through screen printing techniques Rockman layers chaotic, expressive portraits onto a large 297 x 196 cm canvas. The faces appear suspended within a dynamic sea of movement, fragmented yet charged with intensity. The work titled Terminal Documents was created during the final months of the artist’s mother’s life, imbuing it with a raw emotional depth and an intuitive, unstructured quality. Rockman’s artistic influences include his experiences growing up amid the Iraq War and the pervasive post-9/11 propaganda as well as the gritty, post-pop aesthetics exemplified by Dash Snow. The title Terminal Documents references a passage from Apocalypse Culture by Adam Parfrey, reinforcing the personal and cultural weight embedded in the piece. Discussions around archival Galliano further reveal Rockman’s fascination with layered histories and cultural memory. This work stands as a poignant testament to the intersection of personal grief and broader socio-political narratives.

In the main hall, a space that balances between a deconstructed cathedral and an industrial warehouse, a long, shelf-like installation showcases dozens of meticulously arranged small objects. This work is by Clara Schmidt, an artist with a background in visual merchandising. Her distinctive ability to organize items into highly specific, narratively charged constellations invites viewers to engage deeply with the miniature scenes. This approach reflects a keen sensibility for detail and storytelling, resonant with practices found in fashion window displays and curated environments.

Later Schmidt’s presence transforms the space through performance. Wearing a balloon-shaped black skirt paired with leggings and heels, she moves across the wooden floor with a fluid grace that blurs the line between strutting and floating. The act evolves as she delicately applies white dots to her outfit with a brush, creating a hauntingly beautiful and enigmatic visual language. This performative gesture is underscored by a subtle live soundscape from Eigil Badal Jørgensen whose music mirrors the rhythm and mood of her movements enhancing the immersive quality of the experience.

As the evening progresses the atmosphere shifts palpably. After a vocal and spoken word performance near Hannah Stewart’s imposing steel stage, the crowd thickens and energy intensifies. Visitors fill staircases, hallways, and exhibition spaces converging in anticipation. The air is charged, signaling the transition from contemplative art engagement to communal celebration.

Noemi Liv Nicolaisen, co-founder of AKA and the event’s charismatic host, moves effortlessly through the crowd announcing her band 20 Stitches’ upcoming performance in a smaller side room. Their music channels pure 2010s electro-pop nostalgia evoking imagery of iPod Nanos, American Apparel hoodies, and the heyday of Tumblr culture. The audience’s response perfectly matches the vibe, nostalgic, ironic, and carefree.

When Noemi and speckman perform “Nevermind” and “Follow Me” the energy erupts. The crowd reacts with wild abandon, jumping, headbanging, and spilling drinks, capturing a sense of youthful euphoria and beautiful messiness. Later sets including one by Europa further cement the night’s momentum. By then attendees are fully immersed, sweaty, glowing, suspended between thumping bass lines and near blackout. The focus on tomorrow dissolves entirely.

Key performances such as SCORE x soli city sound at Chess Club, the play Decompressurization Act II by Layo Mussi & Emma Bombail starring Goran Arif outside the Technical University Hamburg, and the final concerts at AKA by Johanna Odersky (Iku) and Charlie Osborne’s goth-influenced live act left lasting impressions.

The festival transcends typical documentation or completion. Its true value lies in the joyous, fleeting experiences it cultivates. Spaces like Chess Club and AKA prove essential for fostering freedom, experimentation, intimacy, nostalgia, and a commitment to underground art and emerging voices. Attending 96 Hours of Summer is less about observation and more about immersion allowing oneself to be enveloped by a warm, vibrant, and profoundly beautiful wave of culture.

96 Hours of Summer thrives in these collisions between exhibition and performance, care and abandon, intimacy and euphoria. By bringing together Chess Club and AKA Studios the festival demonstrates that Hamburg’s underground is not only alive but constantly reimagining itself. Here art resists static display, spills into stairwells, bleeds into conversations, and carries on deep into the night. In doing so it redraws the city’s cultural map not with institutions and monuments but with fleeting, collective moments that leave a lasting mark.

You can visit the corresponding exhibition to 96 Hours of Summer at Chess Club in Hamburg until August 16.