boundary-pushing projects get world premiere at forecast festival in berlin

forecast festival: latest Interdisciplinary mentorships

Interdisciplinary mentorship network Forecast has organized a two-day festival at Berlin’s cultural center, Radialsystem, on March 15–16, concluding the 2023-2024 edition of the program. The Forecast Festival presents new projects by artists, performers, writers, and creative thinkers as they get their world premiere, following a months-long collaboration with renowned mentors who also introduced their own work and shared the themes that inspire and move them.

all images © Camille Blake, courtesy Forecast Festival

The Forecast Festival (see more here) featured seven final mentee productions that ranged from experience performances to screenings, installations, and readings 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 inaugurated workshops and activations as part of Spring School: Plants in Cityscapes. Forecast alumnus and cartoonist Ulli Lust and artist Markus Hoffmann, as well as LINA Architecture Platform Fellows Neo-Futuristic Walks, each offered a three-day workshop around plants in urban landscapes.

Manhandle by Gustavo Gomes

discover the six productions by the mentees

The first production is the work of Bolivian composer, performer, and researcher Carlos Gutiérrez, who seeks inspiration from the Bolivian Highlands’ indigenous music. He creates instruments, public interventions, and installations exploring tuning systems, sound spatialization over long distances, and aural illusions. Gutiérrez premiered at the Forecast Festival what he calls Infinite Warp and Weft, an audience-activated temporal network of several interdependent rhythmic levels. Specifically, the installation entails a digital matrix score conceived as an expandable, collapsible notational space. It can generate elastic music structures with multiple coexisting time layers, rhythm configurations, and combinatorial possibilities. Rhythms turn into continuous tones with flexible time and pitch parameters. Add to these movements the possibility of generating several interdependent rhythmic levels, and one obtains a multilayered grid, a complex weaving of time. Mentor Greg Fox, a multi-instrumentalist, joined Gutiérrez on stage for a live set.

Infinite Warp and Weft by Carlos Gutiérrez

Up next is DEADSTOCK—Life of a Garment, a project by Aidan Jayson Peters, aka Klein Muis, a South African designer whose research-driven work prioritizes problem-solving in scalable and ecologically responsible manners. Using materials from Johannesburg’s so-called ‘discard sites’ of European clothing to create complete looks, his 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 garment’s life cycle. Georgian fashion designer Irakli Rusadze took on the role of a mentor for this production.

DEADSTOCK—Life of a Garment by Aidan Jayson Peters

Cologne-based choreographer, director, and filmmaker Gustavo Gomes proposes Manhandle, a docufiction that focuses on sexual violence against men, interlacing mythology, and interviews with survivors and social workers in Germany. It deals with the complex thresholds between fantasy, perception, and dissociation while exposing coping mechanisms that survivors develop as adults. The project expands on Gomes’s 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 one already knows. Dialoguing between film and performance, Manhandle explores the boundaries of the traumatized body and the brain’s ability to recreate reality for survival. The first iteration was a live performance entitled Blue Shoe—Theater of Apophenia at the Forecast Forum in July 2023. Gomes then met with his mentor — artist and filmmaker Roee Rosen — for a work stay in Saõ Paulo, where they began shifting the project from stage to screen.

Manhandle by Gustavo Gomes

Roee Rosen also mentored Georgian artist Mari Kalabegashvili, who observes the urban environment of Tbilisi as an extreme playground in If You Catch My Drift. Through her camera lens, viewers become entrenched in Tbilisi’s countercultures. Her 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 uses spiraling rubber tracks as an analogy for our existential journeys, drawing formal parallels to prehistoric depictions of coils or mazes.

If You Catch My Drift by Mari Kalabegashvili

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 on decolonization, climate crisis, and nostalgia. With his performative project Thoughts on Fluid Assemblages, he enacts an inquiry into the empathy needed to respond to the climate crisis — examining how human and non-human bodies are impacted by climate change and water pollution on a micropolitical level. The new work also highlights collaboration, co-creation, and co-authorship by recreating impressions of entangled bodies, fluidity, and the porous exchange between human and non-human. Artiga Rodriguez has invited artists, performers, and dancers Carla Anacker, Edgar Lessig, and Icaro Lopez de Mesa Moyano to experiment with collaborative methodologies of dramaturgical, choreographic, and scenographic creation. Japanese performer, theater director, and choreographer Yuya Tsukahara acted as his mentor and even performed a unique piece that interprets the structure of Forecast 8.

Thoughts on Fluid Assemblages by Victor Artiga Rodriguez

Finally, Canadian 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 participated in somatic practices to find new ways of narrating the histories that have shaped their relationship. They revisited 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 inform the subsequent manuscript, portraying not a past trauma but an enduring one that lives in how she relates to the world. In unearthing intergenerational trauma and documenting it through a multifaceted process, White Horses Always Run Home creates 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. Meanwhile, award-winning poet and feminist scholar Gabeba Baderoon, who mentored Huerta, read selected works at Forecast Festival.

White Horses Always Run Home by Marcela Huerta