I've always heard about how summer is the perfect time to visit Berlin. Unlike many other European countries, which are best escaped from during this time of the year, apparently, in the German city, the weather allows you to enjoy it in all its glory without its usual greyness and coldness, the kind of panorama we have encountered when visiting for other editions of the Forecast Festival—the yearly gathering where mentors and mentees from different artistic disciplines unite to present the result of a yearlong process of creation. However, this year, the call to attend arrived some months later than the usual March, and a sunny and warm Berlin opened its doors to us for a new edition of an event that feels renovated and invigorated, and that finds in the vitality of July the perfect ambience to keep nurturing curiosity for the arts and to celebrate its first decade.
We are familiar with the valuable and very productive work the Forecast platform does year after year to keep alive and in constant evolution the various art disciplines they have on their radar, and we never fail to discover new names to keep an eye on, as well as enjoying the work of some others that already have a more extended and successful career behind them. This one was an important edition, celebrating a decade since its first gathering. Having been able to attend in the past, its evolution and growth are evident, not only in the way the festival is presented but also in the way it is perceived by the audience.
Its very complex system and dynamics can be summarized as the selection of various mentors and applications from hundreds of potential mentees, from whom a final three are selected by each one and a yearlong process starts, developing a project that will be presented to the public and the final selection of one winner who will continue their work with the support of Forecast. Usually, this whole process is presented to the audience in two separate events: the Forecast Forum, where all projects by all mentees are presented to the audience, usually in July, and the Forecast Festival, where we only get to see the winning projects during a weekend in March. Now both are combined into a big four-day event, allowing the offer to be more varied and rich for the audience, and the attention and interest to be more present and tangible for the artists showing their work.
It is in this variety that we find how the quality of the projects presented and their approach has grown significantly, being almost impossible to imagine which one would be chosen as the winner, as all of them have something very special to offer. During these four days, we get to see, condensed and in the same space, the wide spectrum that the artists' practices offer: performance, installations, audiovisual, music, film, magic and even stand-up, all happening in the same halls of the Radialsystem, the arts centre facing the Spree River that has always been the home of Forecast. This edition had six mentors, who presented their work and their mentees' work, two each day, leaving the fourth day for workshops by ten Forecast alumni, who were also present throughout the event with the DJ sets that enlivened the evenings.
The first day started with the work of Lucy McRae's mentees. Lucy, the multidisciplinary science-fiction artist and body architect known for her futuristic approach to crafts, encouraged her pupils to explore the act of thinking in a challenging way, questioning the relationship our minds and bodies have with the system we inhabit. Lena Becerra's Gestational Interface reimagined the body as a responsive ecosystem with a breathing and living visceral system and an extremely compelling performance that featured slime and floating bodies, Amy Chiao's The Post-Gilbreth Way Workshops reframed labour through embodied movement and universally relatable reflections about job practices, and Jiaqing Mo's Love of the Angel explored intimacy and communication through surreal storytelling and a live DJ set that was very hard not to dance to.
It was not the first time at Forecast for the second mentor of the day, performer and magician Tom Cassani, who was once a mentee and now returns leading a group of apprentices that, in the same surreal and spellbound way as he approaches his work, presented complex stagings where the body becomes the main character and the vessel to convey all sorts of emotions. Emilie Largier's Sleep, My Love examined the gradual erosion of trust in one's own senses through an immersive performance that felt like entering an oneiric world, Hsiang-Sheng Teng's Liminal drew on the language of magic with silks to question the boundaries between illusion and reality, and Chris Yarnell's Perpetuity imagined an immortal figure trapped in endless existence, using movement and illusion to reflect on time and loneliness.
The second day brought together the groups of two mentors with very distinctive approaches to each of their disciplines. The first one, Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva, is an all-rounder whose work we discovered on our previous visit to the Almaty Museum of Arts, where there is an extensive exhibition dedicated to her work. Presenting one of her cyber-textile pieces in the exhibition on the upper floor of the Radialsystem, the work of her mentees was as interesting as hers.
Camila Flores-Fernández's Specters of Extraction revisited the Andean myth of the Pishtaco to examine colonial violence, extractivism, and the exploitation of bodies and data through AI, questioning how the sort of oppression lived in the past still prevails, just reinvented. Poyuan Juan's Stanford Bunny and the Memorial Site traced the afterlives of digital technologies, linking 3D scanning, obsolete software, and online memory to reveal how ideology persists within virtual spaces, with a rabbit as a symbol that comprises it all. Ana Mikadze's Invisible Threads drew on centuries-old silk production in Georgia to explore imperial histories, forced labour, and the entanglement of craft, ecology, and political power through symbolic objects like cribs and mobiles made with this material.
The second mentor of the day, Heinali, the Ukrainian composer and sound artist who blends the past with the present through works like the one he presented on the Forecast stage, where traditional Ukrainian folk vocals harmonize with his modular synthesis techniques in a reinterpretation of Hildegard von Bingen's music, encouraged his mentees to do the same: to blur the notions of time through sound. Mariana Carrilho's Flor do Ibo used her beautiful opera-trained voice to honour memory, ancestry, and the experiences of Mwani women, Pablo V Cazares' The Cloud of Unknowing took an alchemical and experimental approach to sound to explore spirituality and the value of direct experience in an increasingly mediated world, and Anna Ivchenko's The Harvest reinterpreted Ukrainian harvest songs as a meditation on occupation and displacement, using layered sonic landscapes to reconnect memory with the land.
The third day started with film projections that invite us to reflect on how the mere act of being alive and moving around this world is a performance in its own right, with artist and mentor Keren Cytter opening the journey with her film trilogy Meltdown, which, with its repetitions, fragmentation, and tone shifts, opened our minds for the work in progress of her mentees. Helen Anna Flanagan's Blind Spot followed a driving instructor and his son through Rotterdam to explore family bonds and memory through simple but meaningful conversations, Nadir Sönmez's About documented his mother's lifelong domestic labour through images, juxtaposed with a narration shaped by his queer perspective, resulting in one of the funniest presentations of the festival, while Mahesh Subramaniam's Tomorrow Morning, I'm Leaving blended documentary and fiction to reflect on his personal experience with departure, belonging, and the memories attached to a city.
To close the set of presentations from mentors and mentees of this edition, humour and wit took the stage, led by comedian, writer and director Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa, who took on his role as opener for his mentees and warmed up the audience with a routine about work dynamics so sad and realistic they ended up being ridiculous and funny. Brandon Aguirre's Turtle Eggs 4 Sale transformed personal experiences of migration, ambition, and everyday awkwardness into stand-up comedy, Siming Lu's Social Death Archive used humour in an experimental way to investigate embarrassment, memory, and the emotional weight of ordinary encounters, and Xabiso Vili's The Past Is In Every Direction combined poetry and comedy to revisit the many versions of the self, on a funny yet emotional note that closed these three days, where human emotions and what is born from them proved to be the perfect source of creation.
