Forecast Festival 2024

Discover Audacious Contributions by the Mentors and Mentees

Boundary-pushing projects by artists, performers, musicians, and poets get their world premiere at the Forecast Festival following a monthslong collaboration with renowned mentors.

Having reached the end of their mentorship period, the mentees in Forecast 8 will unveil their productions in the two-day Forecast Festival, from March 15–16 at Radialsystem, Berlin.

The mentors will also offer insights into their own work, and the topics that inspire and move them. Experience performances, installations, readings, and talks by: poets Gabeba Baderoon (mentor) and Marcela Huerta (mentee); musicians Greg Fox (mentor) and Carlos Gutiérrez (mentee); visual artist Roee Rosen (mentor) and performer Gustavo Gomes (mentee) as well as photographer Mari Kalabegashvili (mentee); fashion designers Irakli Rusadze (mentor) and Aidan Jayson Peters (mentee); performance artists Yuya Tsukahara (mentor) and Victor Artiga Rodriguez (mentee).

 

In addition to the Festival, Forecast will also inaugurate a rich program of workshops and activations as part of

Spring School: Plants in Cityscapes
March 11–16

Forecast alumni cartoonist Ulli Lust and artist Markus Hoffmann, as well as LINA Architecture Platform Fellows Neo-Futuristic Walks will each offer a three-day workshop around the topic of plants in urban landscapes.

Scroll down for the full program:

Program

FRIDAY, MARCH 15
From 7:30 pm | Doors 6:30 pm

From 6:30 pm Mari Kalabegashvili captures Tbilisi’s male‑dominated subcultures through the lens of her camera, and observes the urban environment of Tbilisi as an extreme playground in If You Catch My Drift. The installation is accessible all evening.

7:30 pm Welcome

Live session by musicians Carlos Gutiérrez and Greg Fox

Composer Carlos Gutiérrez will premiere the site-aware sound installation Infinite Warp and Weft, an audience-activated temporal network of several interdependent rhythmic levels. The work is accessible all evening.

8:30 pm Mari Kalabegashvili, mentor Roee Rosen, and Tbilisi Architecture Biennale co‑curator Tinatin Gurgenidze in conversation.

9:00 pm With a showcase entitled Singular Craft: Couture in Focus, fashion designer Irakli Rusadze homes in on a single item from his collection to highlight the craftsmanship, expertise, and hours of labor that go into producing a single contemporary couture piece, inspired by traditional Georgian garb. “Every stitch and every choice of material becomes a deliberate expression of an artistic vision, rooted in cultural influences and shaped by a desire to bridge the gap between the past and the present.”

Aidan Jayson Peters debuts his upcycled collection DEADSTOCK–Life of a Garment, which highlights the ingenuity of working with the discarded products sent from Europe to Africa. 

Following the fashion show, Aidan Jayson Peters and Irakli Rusadze will be joined by journalist Celina Plag for a conversation.

10pm Closing set by Greg Fox

SATURDAY, MARCH 16
From 5 pm | doors 4 pm

2 pm Exploratory Walk by LINA Architecture Platform Fellows Neo-Futuristic Walks

Accessible all evening: Mari Kalabegashvili, If You Catch My Drift

5:00 pm Welcome

Poet Gabeba Baderoon will read from new work, a verse memoir about concussion titled Autobiography of Sand: Relief Map of A Drifting Mind. The memoir draws on an archive of medical records, doctors’ notes, pain diaries, memoirs of illness, research on concussion, and colonial diaries. Formally mirroring its subject, the manuscript is structured not into chapters but fragments, hesitancies, and hauntings. Almost discernable beneath this repetitive lexicon are the unplanned jottings from which poetry is born. 

Writer Marcela Huerta creates an empathetic and collaborative poetic portrait of her mother, Yolanda Huerta, a refugee of the 1973 Chilean coup. Over several months, they traveled to the sites of Yolanda’s refugee story and participated in somatic practices to find new ways of narrating the histories that have shaped their relationship. Followed by a conversation with Gabeba Baderoon.

6:30 pm Performer, choreographer, and experimental performance festival director Yuya Tsukahara will enact a conceptual activation of the audience and venue in preparation for his mentee’s contribution.

Victor Artiga Rodriguez stages improvisations around pollution and bodies in his performative project Thoughts on Fluid Assemblages. Together with co-creators and performers Carla Anacker, Edgar Lessig, and Icaro Lopez de Mesa Moyano, the four examine how human and non-human bodies are impacted by climate change and water pollution on a micropolitical level.

7:30 pm Gustavo Gomes will premiere his film Manhandle, a documentary about sexual violence against men that reveals the complex thresholds between fantasy, guilt, shame, and dissociation.

Artist Roee Rosen will share his work The Dust Channel, which he describes as a cultural exquisite corpse: an operetta with a libretto in Russian about a British home appliance, a Dyson DC07 Vacuum Cleaner, set in an Israeli reality of private perversion and socio-political phobias. Coproduced by documenta 14.

Following the screenings, Gustavo Gomes and Roee Rosen will be joined by art critic Hili Perlson for a conversation.

Spring School: Plants in Cityscapes
March 11–16

We often take plants in the urban landscape for granted: we see them on a daily basis but don’t really look. We usually cannot name them, nor do we know whether they’re edible or have healing properties. It’s typically only when nature becomes a nuisance, for example during allergy season, that we take note of plants in the city. 

Forecast alumni cartoonist Ulli Lust and artist Markus Hoffmann are joined by LINA Architecture Platform Fellow Neo Futuristic Walks (consisting of Aušra Česnauskytė and Goda Verikaitė) in offering a rich program of three distinct multi-day workshops that will examine plants in the city from different perspectives. The Spring School will also feature a digital talk from LUMA Arles.

The Spring School is organized by Forecast as contribution to LINA Architecture Platform

in cooperation with Living Summer School and LUMA Arles / Atelier LUMA

 

Workshop by Ulli Lust 

Spazieren: 1. to go for a walk, 2. to walk around in a carefree and cheerful manner.

In the etymological dictionary, the German term “Spazieren” is found under the word “spatio” for space or in-between space. It describes the activity of being in-between, whose sole purpose is remaining in movement outdoors and engaging in contemplative observation. The sensory system is alert and registers the smallest pattern deviations. No phenomenon is too ephemeral to be ignored. Every millimeter of urban space can become the occasion for a far-reaching excursion. 

In this workshop, we will study everyday space with the attitude of researchers, reading the city and its signs. Our reflections will be translated into black-and-white sequential pictorial narratives on paper. These drawn comic reportages or essays are then reproduced as small-format zines using a photocopier. 

About Ulli Lust 

Ulli Lust is a cartoonist and the author of several award-winning graphic novels. Her published work also includes comic journalism featuring observations on contemporary life. Her most celebrated graphic novel, Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, is an autobiographical work which revisits the trials and tribulations of her rebellious seventeen-year-old self, hitchhiking through Italy. The novel has been translated into twelve languages and won several awards, including the 2011 Prix révélation [jj1] at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Her most recent novel, How I Tried to Be a Good Person, was shortlisted for the Fauve d’Or at Angoulême in 2018. She currently teaches on the BA Visual Communication at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover.

ullilust.de

Workshop by Markus Hoffmann: Urban Alchemy 

Together, we will forage plants in the city. We will share knowledge about the healing potential of the plants and them in urban areas. The process of collecting plants will become a performative act of moving through the city. 

Over the course of the workshop, we will transform the herbs and foraged plants into teas and fermented products that can also take sculptural forms. 

About Markus Hoffmann 

Markus Hoffmann received his fine arts education at the Universität der Künste Berlin, studying at the Institute für Raumexperimente founded by Prof. Olafur Eliasson. In his art, he delves into concepts of time, place, personal history, and collective memory, examining viewers’ abilities to connect with their surroundings and the limitations that come with these connections. His work spans a varied spectrum of media, including conceptual photography, time-based sculptures, sculptural performances, and installations. His approach merges scientific methods and the creation of new realities to produce works that allow for spatial or individual projection.

markushoffmann.art

Workshop by Neo-futuristic Walks 

Neo-futurists are coming to Berlin and invite you to join a three-day “walkshop” around Radialsystem!

We will look at the city from a neo-futuristic perspective: attempting to translate our urban endeavors and speculations into a collective walkable narrative. Together, we will drift along the River Spree and become city inspectors by analyzing urban imperfections, accidents, glitches, rumors, memories, and legends. In three day-long sessions, we will experiment with the concept of degrowth and envision how it could relate to the micro-scale situations in situ. At the end, we will collect our findings and ideas into one communal chimera of neo-futuristic stories and invite the public to a walk in the area surrounding Radialsystem, leading to the opening of the second day of Forecast Festival 8.

About Neo-futuristic Walks

The project was initiated in 2020 by the Lithuanian spatial designers Aušra Česnauskytė and Goda Verikaitė, currently based in The Netherlands. They started the project as a collective laboratory to combine architectural and speculative design with performative practices. As a series of walkshops, Neo-futuristic Walks has already traveled to cities such as London, Vilnius, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Rotterdam, and Antwerp. The project was also presented in multiple design festivals and events, including Dutch Design Week (2021), Eindhoven; London Festival of Architecture (2021); Politics of Space symposium, Vilnius (2022); Walking as Research Practice conference, Amsterdam (2022); WantedDesign Manhattan, New York (2023); and DesignTo festival, Toronto (2024).

neofuturisticwalks.com

Program & Tickets 

Tickets for each of the three-day workshops are available for 40 euros. This includes full-day workshops over three days (Mon, March 11–Wed, March 13, 2024), light lunches, and admission to the Forecast Festival (March 15-16, 2023).

Workshop Days with Ulli Lust, Markus Hoffmann, or Neo Futuristic Walks: 

Monday, March 11, 2024, 11am–6pm  

Tuesday, March 12, 2024, 10am–5pm 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024, 10am–6pm  

Public Walk in the framework of the Forecast Festival (March 15–16, Radialsystem, Berlin): 

Saturday, March 16, 2pm