We present our feature on Forecast Festival 2026, celebrating its interdisciplinary program of performances, music, screenings, visual art, design, and stand-up comedy. The festival returned on its 10th anniversary from 16–19 July 2026 at Berlin’s Radialsystem, featuring its mentorship program, which pairs emerging global talent with expert mentors across contemporary fields of art and culture. This year’s mentors represented a global spectrum of diversity: Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa (LK): Writer and comedian; Tom Cassani (UK): Performance maker; Keren Cytter (IL): Artist and filmmaker; Lucy McRae (AU): Sci-fi artist and body architect; Almagul Menlibayeva (KZ): Multimedia artist; Heinali (UA): Composer and sound artist.
Through exclusive photographic documentation, this feature captures the atmosphere of Radialsystem and its vibrant artistic practices. Forecast gives artists and creative minds worldwide the opportunity to collaborate with experienced mentors to bring their projects to life. Forecast transcends neatly defined disciplines and genres to provide insight into creative production processes, and carve out space for the questions on the minds of the next generation of trailblazers.
Each year, creative minds working in various disciplines are invited to submit project proposals via an open call. The selection process is two-tiered. First, the mentors carefully review all proposals and invite three nominees each to workshop with the mentor and present their ideas at the Forecast Festival in Berlin. At the event’s conclusion, each mentor chooses one mentee. The six mentees receive extended mentoring including a short-term residency, in which mentor and mentee meet in person for up to two weeks of intensive exchange, usually with a host institution. At the end of this mentorship phase, mentees premiere their final productions.
Forecast is a platform dedicated to the support, mentoring, and promotion of trailblazing creative practices and audacious artists. Founded in 2015 by Artistic Director Freo Majer, Forecast encompasses the one-on-one mentorship program Forecast Mentorships; the workshop series Forecast Condensed; and is the initiator of collaborative projects with multiple institutional partners, such as Driving the Human (2020–2023) and Housing the Human (2018–2019).
Heinali: The Distant Mirror
Oleh Shpudeiko, known as Heinali, is a composer and sound artist whose work channels early Western music through electronic composition and modular synthesis, using the past as a “distant mirror” to expose contradictions in contemporary life.
Born in Kyiv, Heinali gained international recognition with Madrigals (2020), which blends period-instrument improvisations with quasi-Renaissance polyphony generated on modular synthesizer. His 2023 album Kyiv Eternal, described by The New York Times as “a ravishing audioscape,” is a hauntological portrait of his home city under attack, layering prewar field recordings with ambient memory loops from his own archives. His 2025 release Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), praised by Pitchfork as “a chilling meditation on wartime trauma and the endurance of faith,” reimagines Hildegard von Bingen’s music through the embodied experience of war, combining Ukrainian traditional vocals by Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko with modular synthesis inspired by medieval polyphony.
Heinali treats the past not as a fixed archive but as a reflective surface—like Perseus’s shield—capable of confronting the present without its blinding glare. His practice centers on reterritorialization: extracting sounds and ideas from their idealized origins and forcing them into modern, contradictory contexts. Rejecting postmodern deconstruction, he reclaims beauty as a vehicle for truth rather than ornament, animating historical material to reveal the hidden tensions of the present.
Working from a position of non-belonging, Heinali uses the “outplaced” voice of history to articulate diasporic and exilic experience. As a mentor, he seeks music and sound artists engaging critically with tradition who resist both academic insularity and market conformity, and who value accessibility over institutional approval and seek resonance beyond professional circles.
Nominees
Mariana Carrilho
Flor Do Ibo
Mariana Carrilho is a Mozambican artist and operatic singer exploring the voice as a vessel for the unseen. Her work across music, poetry, audiovisual media, and performance is shaped by classical training and hybrid processes. Her proposal centers on original music, sound, and memory, with the female voice as a site of continuity and resistance. Anchored in Ibo Island, home to the Mwani people, it weaves testimonies and local soundscapes into a musical language blending ancestral knowledge, melody, and chant. Conceived as an homage to her ancestors and to Mwani women facing war and displacement since 2017, it also draws on a colonial-era shop that stood between Black and European neighbourhoods as a metaphor for living between worlds.
Pablo V Cazares
The Cloud of Unknowing
Pablo V Cazares is an American artist who uses the principles of alchemy to create unique sound experiences with handmade nondigital drone devices. Through the use of simple mechanisms and accessible materials, he engages thresholds and explores psychoacoustic phenomena, confronting the imagined separation between body and spirit. Drawing from the alchemical philosophy of accessing spirit through the working of matter, Cazares is developing a score for The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century treatise on the impossibility of accessing God through the rational mind. As our lives increasingly take place online and by proxy, he seeks to call attention to the value of direct experience in the material world and our capacity for transformation.
Anna Ivchenko
The Harvest
Anna Ivchenko is an artist and musician working across sound installation, performance, and video. She examines collective and personal memory alongside environmental and political issues, seeking to reconnect disrupted histories and question inherited structures. She proposes a multi-channel audio installation that casts Ukrainian harvest songs and lamentations as metaphors for cycles of life, death, and return. It reflects on occupation as territorial loss and rupture of knowledge and cultural continuity, framing these songs as bridges to those who sowed, harvested, and mourned on those fields before. Through field recordings, modular synthesis, and layered speculative vocals, the work forms a shifting sonic field where voices emerge and fade like soil strata—compressed, unsettled, and reawakened across time.
Lucy McRae: Introspective Futurism
Artist Lucy McRae leads a multidisciplinary art-research studio investigating the impact of technology and science on the planet and the natural world. Alongside her gallery- and museum-focused art practice, she works as a director and maker and moves fluidly between the writer’s room and the lab.
McRae pioneers new narratives about how future technologies may transform human intimacy, reproduction, biology, and health, while foregrounding the ethical implications of genetic engineering. Through speculative, world-building approaches, her work uses hypothesis as a tool to question who we are, how we relate to our bodies, and where we may be headed.
Based in Los Angeles, McRae is a visiting professor at architecture school SCI_Arc, a TED fellow, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She also works as a world-builder and futurist consultant on Hollywood productions with multiple Oscar-winning directors and producers.
As a mentor, McRae seeks candidates who lead with intuition, kindness, and courage—people willing to be vulnerable, to experiment, and to trust frustration as part of the creative process. Many may be motivated by feeling like outsiders and are collaborative by nature, unafraid of challenge or friction. Projects may emerge from dance, architecture, or hybrid practices that exist between disciplines.
“I’m especially interested in immersive work that engages the body—movement-based practices, music and visual environments, fashion, machines and apparatuses, spatial design, motion capture, sport, and other forms that explore physical intelligence and embodied experience. I’m drawn to projects that resist easy categorization and demand new ways of thinking and making.”
Working with McRae offers an honest exchange shaped by over two decades of navigating an interdisciplinary practice built through invention and uncertainty. “I value curiosity, deep listening, and collaboration across very different backgrounds. Mentorship is not one-directional—I’m equally interested in learning from mentees, and in shaping a shared space where uncertainty is welcomed and exploration is actively supported.”
Nominees
Lena Becerra
Gestational Interface
Lena Becerra is an artist and researcher working across media to explore prosthetic ecologies and speculative anatomies at the intersection of art, philosophy, science, and technology. She proposes an immersive installation composed of body-scale prosthetic ecosystems that circulate, leak, and respond to proximity. Wearable elements extend the body, linking sensation and movement to a larger responsive system. Through sensors and feedback loops, the work activates vibration, pressure, and shifting tensions. The installation evolves continuously, unfolding through activation and moments of choreographed engagement. It also foregrounds its mechanisms—tubing, fluids, and structure—thus inviting attunement to breath, gesture, and shared transformation within a permeable, living environment.
Amy Chiao
The Post-Gilbreth Way Workshops
Amy Chiao is a multimedia artist, designer, performer, and director working across site-specific performance, installation, collage, and video. Her practice explores the constructed nature of society through dramaturgy, narratology, and speculative design. In this participatory series that reimagines Lillian and Frank Gilbreth’s Time and Motion Studies—which categorized fatigue as “humanity’s greatest unnecessary waste”— Chiao draws from her experience as a CMF designer in robotics to create assembly line scores that foreground the human sensory experience. Using imprecise timekeeping, anthropomorphic design, and micro-expression scripts, the project proposes arational forms of repetitive labor that move toward embodied, non-drudgerous states of being.
Jiaqing Mo
Love of the Angel
Jiaqing Mo is a visual artist and filmmaker whose interdisciplinary practice spans film, photography, installation, and text. She explores psychological states and fractured communication, often creating dreamlike atmospheres in her work. Central to her approach is the feeling of “dissociation,” of simultaneously inhabiting and observing a situation. Her proposal follows a deaf-mute angel who heals through touch, and a one-legged man who repeatedly returns to be treated. But his experimental surgery fails. Set across surreal environments, the work uses absurdist fiction to examine nonverbal communication, intimacy, and longing. The project unfolds through a multi-channel film installation, sculptural settings, staged photography, and a hybrid fictional diary.
Almagul Menlibayeva: Unruly Images
Artist Almagul Menlibayeva works with video, photography, and cyber-textiles shaped with AI. Her practice reinterprets contemporary processes in Central Asia through mythologies and collective memory, centering women’s autonomy via the epistemic heritage of nomadic feminism, especially in Kazakhstani culture. Her work critically reflects on environmental degradation, modernization, and the politics of visibility in global image systems.
Menlibayeva has exhibited internationally at major biennials including, among others, at Venice, Sydney, South Korea, Thailand, and Ulaanbaatar. She held the solo exhibition Transformation at the Grand Palais, Paris (2016). Recent projects include a major multi-channel video installation on the Kazakh Famine at the 2023 Sharjah Biennale, and participation in the 2025 Digital Biennale Hamburg in collaboration with sound artist German Popov (OMFO). From 2025–2026, she is presenting a retrospective solo exhibition, I Understand Everything, curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong, at the Almaty Museum of Arts (AMA), Kazakhstan. She is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
As a mentor, Menlibayeva seeks artists who are ready to critically engage with image systems and the politics of memory in the AI era—examining how algorithms, platforms, and global narratives shape the visibility, value, and perceived credibility of images. She is especially interested in artists who approach autonomy not as total control, but as authorship-as-intervention: the capacity to intervene in circulation, framing, and interpretation, while addressing the ethical and ecological consequences of technology.
“This mentorship is a strong fit for artists questioning how images circulate today—how context flattens, memory fractures or multiplies, and trust is reshaped—and who are ready to iterate rigorously through research and practice,” Menlibayeva says.
Artists working in any medium are welcome to apply. Projects that revisit the past as a form of intervention—questioning archives, institutions, platforms, and algorithmic power—are particularly encouraged.
Nominees
Camila Flores-Fernández
Specters of Extraction
Camila Flores-Fernández is an artist working across documentary, installation, and research on memory, extractivism, gender, and collective resistance. She revisits the Andean myth of the Pishtaco as a historical response to colonial violence and reframes it as a lens for contemporary algorithmic extraction. The tale of a pale monster with metallic wings who steals body fat and eyes from Indigenous peasants emerged in colonial Peru and intensified under modernization, foreign exploitation, and neoliberal authoritarian regimes. Fat signifies labor and life force; eyes, knowledge and witnessing. Today, extraction extends to data, images, and memory through AI systems. Using archival material, video, and generative AI, the project reimagines the Pishtaco as a figure of algorithmic capitalism.
Poyuan Juan
Stanford Bunny and the Memorial Site
Poyuan Juan investigates the cultural afterlives of digital platforms, focusing on online games, virtual environments, and technological obsolescence. At the intersection of digital archaeology and new media, Juan uses game engines and 3D-imaging tools to explore cyberqueer narratives and the material conditions of virtual experience. This proposal explores digital sovereignty and memory warfare melding Russian bunny folklore and the Stanford Bunny—a 1990s computer graphics test model—into a geopolitical allegory on occupied heritage. With leaked data, Juan reconstructs dismantled Soviet statues, rendering monuments as flickering probabilistic memories. By treating ideological monuments as tactical game pieces, this project frames history as a strategic board game where empires manipulate data to occupy the cloud and collective subconscious.
Ana Mikadze
Invisible Threads
Ana Mikadze is a Georgian artist and researcher of Armenian descent whose work examines imperial legacies in the Caucasus through extractive labor systems. Their performance traces the decimation of silk culture under Tsarist rule in the 19th century, using recovered archival testimonies, escape records, and ritual incantations. Carceral labor bound women as well as silkworms to imperial productivity, dismantling sericulture’s ancient cosmological relations between peoples, insects, seasons, and sacred practice. With spatial narration and storytelling they ask how can fragmented knowledge be inherited and what forms of care persist. Positioning the Caucasus within a broader inquiry into imperial erasure and embodied memory, archives turn into sites of recovery, mourning, and speculation.
Tom Cassani: Authentic Deception
Tom Cassani is an award-winning performance maker working with magic and the body. His ongoing artistic explorations draw on an expanded approach to magic, using strategies of Live Art, techniques of circus sideshow, and methods of illusion to create almost impossible performance art. Cassani is known for illusory texts, imagery, and physical skills that expose the body as an unreliable measure of truth. He performs durational hair suspension, deconstructed sleight of hand, and sword swallowing demonstrations. This work often reveals the mechanics of trickery and dangerous feats while making us aware of our role in experiencing the seemingly impossible.
Cassani was the UK participant in the first BETA Circus program from 2020–22, developing contemporary magic across Europe with artists from twelve countries. In 2023, he was awarded a Forecast mentorship with acclaimed choreographer Florentina Holzinger, from which emerged the foundation for his solo show Iterations. In 2024, Cassani was selected as an Aerowaves artist with Iterations and subsequently toured extensively across Europe. That same year, he was awarded a scholarship to undertake a practice-based PhD at the University of Huddersfield, focusing on expanded and experimental performance magic.
Cassani is also the Managing Editor of the Journal of Performance Magic, one of the few academic journals dedicated to the exploration and development of discourse around this discipline. In addition to solo work and research over the past ten years, he has worked as a consultant magician, outside eye, and dramaturg of deception with dancers, circus artists, choreographers, theater-makers, and performance artists across the UK and Europe.
Cassani is interested in working with artists keen to expand the frames, contexts, and possibilities in which magic and deception can operate. Applicants do not need to be magicians or have prior experience with magic. Practitioners may come from Live Art, performance art, theater, contemporary circus, choreography, cabaret, or related fields, with or without experience in magic-aligned practices such as sleight of hand, illusion, mentalism, or sideshow.
He is particularly interested in contemporary and experimental approaches to performance magic that explore authenticity and deception, foreground the mechanics of trickery, and question how belief, perception, and the body are constructed in performance. As a mentor, he offers reflective dialogue and creative support grounded in experience across multiple forms and contexts, creating an open, thoughtful, and experimental space for developing methods and testing ideas.
Nominees
Emilie Largier
Sleep, My Love
Emilie Largier is a French multidisciplinary artist, physical theater performer, and theatrer maker working across performance, moving image, and visual arts. Her proposal combines live performance and multimedia installation to explore dissociation and the gradual erosion of trust in one’s senses, leading to fracture. Drawing on illusion as a metaphor for gaslighting and coercive control, it bends perception while revealing its underlying logic. The work treats performance as a space where attention, visibility, and belief are manipulated, inviting the audience into an unstable sensory environment where seeing and knowing no longer coincide. Continuing on her research into domestic violence and its psychological impact, the project seeks forms that articulate what might resist direct representation.
Hsiang-Sheng Teng
Liminal
Hsiang-Sheng Teng, also known as Shawn, is a London-based artist and researcher from Taiwan with a background in anthropology. His boundary-defying works include magic, theater, film, photography, installation, documentary, and audio-visual art. In this proposal, Hsiang-Sheng challenges and transforms so-called silk magic—a subgenre of classical conjuring and performance magic—by re-examining it through the frameworks of live art and performance art. The project explores the “in-betweenness“ of East and West; eternal and ephemeral; performance and life; illusion, and the reality it creates. Informed by devising processes and scholarly research, Hsiang-Sheng proposes a new aesthetic language to contextualize and re-situate classical conjuring and performance magic within the field of the performing arts.
Chris Yarnell
Perpetuity
Chris Yarnell is a theater-maker and director creating visually driven performance that combines movement, illusion, and live storytelling. His work explores the tension between control and collapse, blending theatrical and cinematic languages to construct precise, image-led worlds. This solo performance examines humanity’s relationship to time, death, and loneliness through an immortal character who has lived for over 2,026 years. It considers what it means to exist beyond natural limits, where routine and endurance distort the self. Using clowning, movement, illusion, and a tightly structured relationship between live action and sound, the project develops a contained performance system designed for ongoing accumulation. At its core, it asks what remains of a person when no endpoint exists to shape a life.
Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa: Playing With Risk
Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa is a comedian, writer, and director. His self-directed and self-written comedy specials include Monsoon Season (2022), French Kiss Tunnel (2024), and Woodapple Jam (2024).
Bandara Rajapaksa’s deadpan style puts audiences at ease while challenging conventional wisdom with a unique tone that is often irreverent, at times poignant, and always hysterical. He is currently working on a puppet show slated for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in his native Sri Lanka.
“If I were to describe what I do, I’d say it’s a form of memoir to some extent,” he says. “I care a lot about applying the craft of stand-up to the things I have to say.”
As a mentor, Bandara Rajapaksa is looking for applicants who engage with the challenge of “properly expressing a feeling,” as he puts it. “One of my favorite things about stand-up is the aspect of risk in it. I would greatly enjoy working with someone whose practice has some aspect of risk.”
While he is open to applications from across disciplines, Bandara Rajapaksa would be particularly interested in taking on a comedian, performance artist, or writer who is in the process of creating their first long-form piece of work—be it a stand-up show, performance piece, play, or any other work meant to be performed live to an audience. Ideally, applicants should already have at least three years of stage experience.
Nominees
Brandon Aguirre
Turtle Eggs 4 Sale
Brandon Aguirre is a stand-up comedian, writer, and producer. His work explores identity, migration, belonging, and the absurdity of taking life too seriously. He proposes a longform stand-up production built around the question of what happens when we stop treating ourselves as fixed characters and begin to see ourselves as in-progress work, an ever-evolving human entity. Rooted in spoken word and direct address, the show moves between personal anecdotes, observations, and abstract ideas, using humor to create a coherent emotional and intellectual arc. The performance explores how migration, work, ambition, and self-image shape the stories we tell ourselves. Developed for an intimate live setting, it aims to offer the insight of another perspective. Not better, not worse—just different.
Siming Lu
Social Death Archive
Siming Lu is a writer and performance maker working with world-building and narrative structures. Her practice constructs frameworks that amplify subtle emotional shifts and fleeting moments, using them as lenses to examine broader social structures. Her proposal examines moments of social awkwardness, embarrassment, and “social death” through constructed situations. Starting from an East Asian cultural perspective, the project explores how social behavior is shaped, misread, and renegotiated in cross-cultural encounters. Through comic timing, fictional framing, and live interaction, the work stages situations in which participants navigate unclear norms, shifting expectations, and subtle social tensions. Blending humor with discomfort, the project treats awkwardness as a productive space where social structures become visible.
Xabiso Vili
The Past Is In Every Direction
Xabiso Vili is a South African poet, performer, and new media artist. A World Poetry Slam Champion, they weave spoken word, theater, and immersive forms to probe memory, spirituality, and the pulse of contemporary African life. Their proposal explores what happens when humor is asked to hold what it usually releases. The live performance cracks open stand-up comedy, testing how far can the format stretch. How might humor and loss tangle into something richer, releasing real intimacy between performer and audience? Moving between poetry and stand-up, the performance sits with sorrow, memory, and discovery, without rushing to resolve them. Shifting imperceptibly between joke and poem, it hunts for the new language to name the weight we all carry.
Keren Cytter: Constructing Delusions
Artist Keren Cytter works across video, film, performance, theater, dance, and drawing. She is widely recognized for her distinctive moving-image works and theatrical productions that blur the boundaries between cinema, performance, and rehearsal. Her practice is characterized by fragmentation, repetition, and abrupt tonal shifts, foregrounding language, gesture, and structure over narrative-driven storytelling. Dialogue in her films is often circular or disjointed, exposing how meaning, intimacy, and power are constructed—and destabilized—through speech.
Cytter’s works frequently examine relationships, gender roles, desire, and interpersonal conflict, presenting intimacy as something scripted, rehearsed, and performed. By collapsing distinctions between actor and character, fiction and autobiography, Cytter treats performance not as representation but as a social condition. Humor, melodrama, and discomfort coexist in her work, producing films that are at once analytical and emotionally charged.
Stylistically, Cytter embraces constraint and apparent simplicity: sparse settings, minimal props, frontal staging, and economical editing. These decisions heighten attention to rhythm, timing, and repetition, allowing subtle formal shifts to generate significant emotional and conceptual impact. Her films often resist narrative closure, instead exposing the mechanics of filmmaking—editing, scripting, acting—as active forces shaping perception.
In 2012, Cytter founded the dance company D.I.E. Now (Dance International Europe Now), extending her interest in the circulation of bodies and scripts across media. She is also an author, having published five novels and three children’s books. Based between New York and Münster, she is a professor at the Art Academy in Münster, Germany.
Cytter’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Kunsthaus Glarus (2025); Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2023); Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen (2022); Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2020); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2019); Museion, Bolzano (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2014). In 2021, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her feature film The Wrong Movie was selected for the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024.
As a mentor, Cytter is interested in working with artists who are confident in their practice, experienced enough to work independently, and open-minded enough to engage seriously with critique. Her mentorship is especially suited to artists developing video art, film, or installations that incorporate moving image.
Her guidance focuses on the technical and formal dimensions of a project—editing, structure, rhythm, staging, performance, and duration—and how these decisions directly affect a work’s clarity and effectiveness.
Nominees
Helen Anna Flanagan
Blind Spot
Artist and filmmaker Helen Anna Flanagan’s work explores tensions tied to power dynamics, anxieties, desires, and fantasies to examine how individuals navigate their place within society and construct their identity. Her latest film Blind Spot is a sketch for an experimental documentary centered on Radj, a Rotterdam-based Surinamese driving instructor. Radj is obsessed with photographing the sky through the open car window. The film follows him and his son, Aryan, as they set out on a simple task: to capture the sun. Driving through Rotterdam, they move between exam routes and locations that hold personal significance. Through their shared activity, the film gradually reveals a father–son relationship shaped by time, work, and creative exchange, while tracing a way of seeing informed by movement, repetition, and attention.
Nadir Sönmez
About
Nadir Sönmez is an actor, writer, director, and interdisciplinary artist. His work across theater, performance, and film draws on acting theory, visual anthropology, psychology, self-help literature, and porn studies to explore intimacy, class, autobiography, masculinities, queer activism, and gay tourism. About documents the artist’s mother as a prolific performance artist, newly discovered in her sixties, honoring a lifetime of domestic work. The film captures her tastes, relationships, and travels while questioning distinctions between amateur and professional image-making. Drawing on his own trajectory within Turkey’s art world, Sönmez uses this project to transfer hard-won privilege to his mother, challenging who is recognized as an artist. The film is accompanied by text-based performances exploring love, career, and friendship.
Mahesh Subramaniam
Tomorrow morning, I’m Leaving
Mahesh Subramaniam is a filmmaker and writer. Raised on folktales and half-remembered films, he explores the threshold between reality and hyperreality in his work. He approaches stories as living entities—fragile presences that surface at the edges of memory before receding. Shaped by research and fabulation, his practice spans experimental documentaries, short films, short stories, and installations. He proposes an expanded-cinema work that takes an impending departure as its premise. A city becomes a collage of half-remembered images, unfinished conversations, and drifting narratives, shaped through an autofictional approach marked by curiosity and hesitation. The work unfolds as a spatial arrangement of photographs, text, moving images, and everyday objects, gathered into the portable form of a suitcase.
