Each Mentor Invites Three Nominees
The eighteen nominated proposals are showcased at the annual Forecast Forum
Browse past editions:
Juliana Sokolová
On Housework
Writer Juliana Sokolová is working on her second book of poems, entitled On Housework, in which she examines the personal and mythological dimension of the slow-burn but ever-present threat of collapse. The poems explore what it is we touch while carrying out housework: a darkness that is prehistoric and always in waiting. In her performance Household Gods, conceived for the Forecast Forum, she will read a cycle of poems from the manuscript. Situated between three languages—Hungarian, Slovak, and English— Sokolová often reflects on language from her position as a writer not working in her mother's tongue, which is Hungarian. Parallel to the book of poems, Sokolová is working on a longform essay reflecting on poetry and the politics of language in the Eastern European context, entitled All the Languages That Have Disappeared From Within Me.
Marcela Huerta
White Horses Always Run Home
Chilean-Canadian writer Marcela Huerta's project proposes an intimate, poetic portrait of the author's mother, Yolanda Huerta, a refugee of the 1973 Chilean coup. The two will participate in somatic practices to find new ways of narrating the histories that have shaped their relationship. They will revisit the geographies of Yolanda's refugee story: Maipú, the neighborhood where she lived before being abducted; Mendoza, the city where she spent her solitary time in hiding; and Winnipeg, the place where she painstakingly built a new life. These trips will inform the subsequent manuscript, portraying not a past trauma but an enduring one that lives forever in the body and in the ways she relates to the world. In unearthing intergenerational trauma and documenting it through a multifaceted process, White Horses Always Run Home aims to create an emotionally cathartic access point for reflecting on how past atrocities shape the struggles of the present, while also creating an empathetic and collaborative poetic experience between a mother and daughter.
Suji Kwock Kim
AND THE PURSUIT OF
Writer and poet Suji Kwock Kim’s project is a full-length mixed-genre manuscript that will expand upon both her first book, Notes From the Divided Country, and her recent chapbook, Notes From the North (Smith/Doorstop, U.K.). In both, she explores the lives of her family and other North Korean migrants in South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. The new work will investigate the fate of the Korean diaspora in these countries, particularly focusing on New Malden, Surrey, which is home to the largest community of North Koreans outside Asia. The manuscript will delve into questions of nation and narration, personal identity and national identity, commemoration and memorialization. It will look at how wars are remembered and forgotten; how the languages of empire and propaganda play in counterpoint with the languages of reportage, resistance, and revolution; how traditional divisions of labor and gender roles are reinscribed or dismantled; how violence is represented; and how cycles of violence can be broken in familial or national history.
Alex Grübler
Chrysalis
German musician Alex Grübler, aka Baal & Mortimer, proposes a transdisciplinary oratorio that seeks to highlight notions around release, resilience, and alchemical modes of art-making. It evokes a speculative hypothesis for how Saturn, the planet linked to melancholy, received its rings, stating that a former moon of Saturn named Chrysalis was torn into pieces 160 million years ago, forming the rings in the distinct steep axial tilt. The oratorio centers on drawn diagrams that will form the metric foundation of the piece, sewn onto textile as scores. A Berlin-based ensemble will participate in the textile- and costume-making and in printing the libretto. The sonic vocabulary will include a vocal ensemble, drums, electronics, and traditional instruments including the psaltery, lute, and odrecillo—a small medieval bagpipe. The piece is conceived as a process-based sonic investigation around breath, muscle, and speculation.
Carlos Gutiérrez
Infinite Warp and Weft
Carlos Gutiérrez is a composer, performer, archivist, and researcher based in La Paz, Bolivia. His work is influenced by the indigenous music of the Bolivian Highlands and extends to the creation of instruments, sound objects, public interventions, and installations in which he explores tuning systems, the spatialization of sound over long distances, aural illusions, decentralized structures, and the relationship between orality and experimental writing. His proposal entails a digital high-resolution matrix score. It’s conceived as an expandable and collapsible notational space that can generate elastic music structures with multiple coexisting time layers, rhythm configurations, and combinatorial possibilities. By applying this flexibility to time and pitch parameters, rhythms can be turned into continuous tones. Add to these movements the possibility of generating several interdependent rhythmic levels, and you’ll obtain a multilayered grid, a complex weaving of time.
Whitney Johnson
FIAT
Chicago-based artist Whitney Johnson, aka Matchess, works in sound composition, performance, and installation with viola, organ, voice, sine waves, electronics, and tape.
Johnson proposes a durational performance and installation for solo viola and multi-channel sound, which strives to explore the mysterious relationship between sound, bodies, and the human psyche. Inspired by the hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd's text Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica from 1617, FIAT will engage with the alternative healing practice of brainwave entrainment. While the hours-long viola performance oscillates in just intonation, the sinewave installation constructs four distinct zones of binaural beating that correspond to energetic categories of brain activity. Visitors are encouraged to come and go, circulating freely in the sonic sensorium while considering their own skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on bodies and minds.
Gustavo Gomes
Blue Shoe–Theater of Apophenia
Cologne-based choreographer, director, and filmmaker Gustavo Gomes proposes a docufiction that focuses on sexual violence against men. Blue Shoe’s script interlaces mythology and interviews with survivors and social workers in Germany. The work thus deals with the complex thresholds between fantasy, perception, and dissociation while exposing coping mechanisms that survivors develop as adults. The project is a further development of Gomes’ previous works on apophenia, the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns across unrelated, random occurrences to ascribe meaning. These thought processes often expose truths based on experience; it’s the ability to only see what you already know. Dialoguing between film and performance, the project explores the boundaries of the traumatized body, and the brain’s ability to recreate reality in order to survive. Gomes will use a visual language that borrows from 1980s video games and artifice to create imagery that serves as a layer of protection and self-representation when touching on trauma, guilt, and shame.
Walter Solon
The Cohen Plan
Brazilian interdisciplinary artist Walter Solon will work on his debut feature film, a satirical docufiction. Set in 1937 Rio de Janeiro, The Cohen Plan fictionalizes the process behind a fake anti-Semitic, anti-communist conspiracy hoax. A young Brazilian army captain and fascist spy is desperate to impress the leader of the far right Integralista party by writing a believable communist conspiracy. But after his “too fantastic” draft is rejected, the idea gets stolen by none other than the president himself. The docufiction departs from the perspective of the conspiracy’s main writer Olympio Mourão. After the plan is intercepted and leaked by General Góes, Mourão‘s direct superior and nemesis, the hoax is presented by the media as real, and used as pretext for a dictatorial coup by President Vargas. The film is based on true historical events and will contain characters from real anti-capitalist movements in present-day Brazil, blending fiction and reality, history and the present.
Selin Davasse and Lucinda Dayhew
Long Legged Birds
Berlin-based artists Selin Davasse and Lucinda Dayhew, hailing from Turkey and Australia respectively, will enact a fervent conversation between two birds of the same species with monstrously divergent statuses in their motherlands. An Australian white ibis (Dayhew), whom humans revile, and a northern bald ibis (Davasse), whom humans revere, find a common language to bond with each other and the audience. Seeking a resonance between non-linguistic, purely sonorous animal speech and literary and vernacular English of assorted flavours, the performance playfully engages with multicultural and multispecies (mis)translation, adaptation and collaboration at a time of pervasive dispossession and habitat loss. Intelligible and unintelligible ibis narrations soar above a chirping, warbling, screeching electronic soundscape, as the audience is seduced and confronted by a speculative world of possibilities for more-than-human intelligence, grace and expression.
Fabian Krestel
The Labyrinth
Fabian Krestel is a Brussels-based dancer and choreographer with formal training as a circus performer. His proposal, which functions as research on the relation between process and product, includes a performance and an installation focused on abstracting circus-related practices such as juggling. In The Labyrinth, Krestel seeks playful ways to translate movement patterns into visual traces within controlled frameworks—yet ones in which randomness may occur. He is looking to carve a space for spectacle, playfulness, complexity, simplicity, and beauty. By exploring physical necessities that are related to movement—for example balancing objects or provoking imbalance—he examines formats that evoke both visual and experiential results; both a trace and an event. Krestel is intrigued by the search for organic forms, near-perfect structures rendered human by a mistake (intentional or not). He wants to share his creative process, and give the public the means to attend and participate in the creation of his works.
Richard McReynolds
Visceral Mindfulness
Richard McReynolds is a Belfast-born composer and multimedia artist living in Cardiff, Wales who explores the ways in which technology blurs the distinctions between artistic mediums. His work includes visualizing sound, generating still images from sonic input, creating electronic instruments to track physical movement, and designing light-tracking installations. McReynolds invites the audience to play with sound, movement, and digital control in active and embodied ways. In his project Visceral Mindfulness, he proposes a performance piece comprising movement and sound, which increasingly grows into an overpowering cacophony. McReynolds, as the performer in the piece, will struggle to endure against the noise, while a webcam will track his movements. The more he moves, the more silence he is able to create. A physical reaction to mental overstimulation, his motions will become more and more aggressive and combative. But battling the onslaught of information is a fight that the performer can’t win.
Victor Artiga Rodriguez
Thoughts on Fluid Assemblages
Hailing from El Salvador, Victor Artiga Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the convergence of poetry, the body, and digital technologies. Through multimedia installations and performances, he explores new forms of narration that touch upon themes of decolonization, climate crisis, and nostalgia. Often interweaving electronics with organic materials such as clay and ceramics, his installations invite the performers and viewers to critically reflect on our condition as a techno-consumer society. Rodriguez aims to create a performative inquiry into methods for communicating the empathy needed to respond to the climate crisis. He proposes a piece that examines how bodies, human and nonhuman, are subject to experience climate changes on a micropolitical scale. Acting out different scenarios, participants will explore, through somatic and sound exercises, how bodies respond to the contamination of water sources. The performances will generate a comprehensive narration-installation that is activated through the moving body and uses maps as an inspiration for its patterns.
Itala Aguilera
Love Bug
Mexican artist and designer Itala Aguilera works as a costume designer for an Off-Broadway theater in New York City, where she is based, and is part of the artist collective Flux Factory. Her proposal reimagines lingerie as erotic wear that takes its cue from the mating calls of cicadas, who produce sound through the movement of their bodies. Similarly, the pieces in the collection will be designed to produce sound-generating movement. These wearable items will play with the idea of lingerie as a garment worn to increase one’s sensuality and confidence and appeal to someone else’s sexual desire. However, the items in the Love Bug collection will ultimately subvert the accepted image of lingerie and its feminine clichés of lace, bows, and flowers. It rejects an image-centered notion of sensuality and makes a bold statement against the fast-fashion products that perpetuate those clichés.
Aidan Jayson Peters
Life of a Garment
Aidan Jayson Peters, aka Klein Muis, is an award-winning designer whose research-driven work prioritizes problem-solving in scalable and ecologically responsible manners. His proposal encompasses a multi-format collection driven by questions surrounding sustainability and upcycling. Titled Life of a Garment, the project will source materials from Johannesburg’s so-called “discard sites” of European clothing to create complete looks. The collection will reflect the clothing items’ journey from the Global North to the Southern hemisphere through photography, texts, and a short film that describes a clothing item’s life cycle. The South African designer seeks to highlight the issue of waste produced in the North being dealt with in the Global South. He underscores the environmental impact of the garment industry as well as the informal economies that pop up around it, and the ingenuity of those who have found new ways to process and reinvent these cast-off products.
Tim van der Loo
The New Blue
Material and textile designer Tim van der Loo's work revolves around post-consumer resources and changing values. The Dutch designer focuses on topics related to regeneration, transformation, and community. Through the use of innovative materials and storytelling, van der Loo aims to engage audiences in ecological, societal, and cultural issues. The New Blue project involves creating a circular jeans material to explore different aspects of denim and the cultural and individual performances associated with it. Denim is often worn without regard for comfort, climate, or representation, and becomes individualized only through wear and tear. In a time when fashion trends are short-lived and social media discourages unique style, he proposes an investigation that would collect data on jeans, and utilize collective knowledge and AI-generated content to create innovative ideas around dressing. The outcomes may range from AI-generated outfits to community-based garments that reflect the zeitgeist of specific demographics.
Anastasiia Kalyta and Mykhailo Bogachov
Sorry That Happened
Ukrainian journalist Anastasiia Kalyta and curator Mykhailo Bogachov have proposed a project that examines how the Russo-Ukrainian war impacts the ways in which those who directly experience it perceive everyday life and contemporary art. The collection Sorry That Happened builds upon Bogachov's photographic archive of his everyday life captured in pre-invasion Kyiv. His imagery is interwoven with Kalyta's visual documentation of drifting across Western Europe following her evacuation in early 2022, as well as various war-related texts. This project originates from an intimate dialogue between two friends that always circles back to the topic of war. Through their photographic discourse, Kalyta and Bogachov strive to work through their experiences before and after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sorry That Happened will employ photography, video, and multimedia installations to delve into how loss—whether collective, ungraspable, personal, or seemingly insignificant—transforms the ways that we perceive, remember, or fail to remember.
Mari Kalabegashvili
If You Catch My Drift
Artist Mari Kalabegashvili is entrenched in Tbilisi’s countercultures. She is a keen observer of these environments, and the visible as well as hidden scars and ruptures that shape them. Her project If You Catch My Drift examines urban environments as extreme playgrounds. Kalabegashvili’s point of departure is the male-dominated scene of automotive vehicle enthusiasts who compete in car races on the city streets and in professional championships. Her lens-based project takes the spiraling rubber tracks as an analogy for our existential journeys, drawing formal parallels to prehistoric depictions of coils or mazes. Kalabegashvili blurs the lines between professional engagement with the material and having fun in the process of capturing it. That’s where she finds her support system, as all subcultural happenings depend and thrive on communal interactions. In addition to her artistic practice, Kalabegashvili works with the Parallel Class project, creating alternative educational initiatives for high school students in Georgia.
Paola de Grenet with 50 & Beyond
Masquerade
The Barcelona-based women’s collective 50 & Beyond includes photographer and illustrator Paola de Grenet, mask-maker Jane Darroch Riley, and musician Sarah Davison. They will set up a mask-making workshop and a pop-up photo studio at Radialsystem to produce portraits that give visual expression to aging in a manner that celebrates it as a process of reconnecting with oneself. The images focus on women around the age when their children become adults, and chores and responsibilities make way for new engagement with the world, and reinvention. The work aims to create the visual components of a narrative in which women can age fearlessly. It is conceived of as a new vocabulary that will generate more images and ultimately create a visual dictionary that highlights the freedom of the aging process, and the connections made when women genuinely reach out to each other and are unafraid to expose their fears and desires.