transmediale 2026: By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road – Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring | 29.01.–01.02.2026

Titled “By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road: Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring,” the transmediale festival will take place in Berlin from 29. January to 01. February, 2026. The festival spans the city from north to south: The main venue, featuring programming on all four festival days as well as the opening on Wednesday 28. January, is the silent green Kulturquartier. For the first time, the CANK in Neukölln will also serve as a festival venue. Both venues will host temporary architectural structures and installations designed as platforms for dialogue and exchange. On Thursday 29. January, CANK will host an evening of live performances.

Image above: Montika Kham-on, Afterlives, 2025, 4K, color, stereo, 19 minutes, film still, photo by Montika Kham-on.

transmediale 2026 is dedicated to exploring diverse approaches to understanding systems, cosmologies, and technologies. Its thematic focus initiates both a geographical and a theoretical shift in the discourse on technology and media, upon which our current understanding of the internet as a global network is based. The festival days transcend the format of a conference program and the presentation of completed works: they create a collaboratively designed space where protocols developed along the equator-spanning Intertropical Convergence Zone can be experienced.

The imaginary coordinates By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road are located in the tropical belt. Alluding to the so-called New Silk Road – known in English as the One Belt One Road initiative – which often presents itself as an alternative for development and infrastructure but perpetuates similar models of dependency and verticality, the festival examines the underlying structures that shape our systems both materially and symbolically. What other ways of connecting are possible? How can we rewire the original codes of our systems and align our behaviors accordingly? What forms of providing (and caring for) infrastructure can emerge when we move beyond extractive paradigms?

The 39th edition of transmediale, curated by Neema Githere and Juan Pablo García Sossa, is conceived as a living, recursive network—a living network of practitioners from around the tropical belt who converge in Berlin. The festival’s ethos proposes a recalibrated pace of coming together: recursive, permeable, and process-oriented. Metaphorically framed by the architecture of a shell, the festival’s rhythm and thematic focus concentrate on rethinking infrastructures, digital lifestyles, and the forms of language that determine how we use and (re)shape these systems. Participants engage in a dialogue with their own practice as well as with other participants.

The program is divided into low-tide and high-tide moments. High-tide formats are aimed at a wider audience and include performances, discussions, and concerts. Low-tide, on the other hand, offers more intimate, ongoing experiences such as film screenings, sound installations, workshops, and ritualistic interventions. Participants engage in both formats, thus opening up different perspectives on their work and the diversity of their practice.

The Curatorial Compass can be read on the festival website.

transmediale Research Netting Groups

As part of the curatorial process leading up to the festival, Research Netting Groups were formed as lateral working group formats, convening locally along the tropical belt. In four geographical zones—the Pacific Islands (Papua New Guinea), the Swahili Coast (Lamu Island, Kenya), Abya Yala/Latin America (Amazon region), and Southeast Asia (Thailand)—these gatherings linked pluriversal perspectives on computing, archiving, storytelling, and worlding. The focus was on localized forms of life and technology that cultivate possibilities for coexistence beyond extraction, acceleration, and global homogenization.

As a central component of transmediale 2026’s relational, process-based approach, the Netting Groups propose a distributed reimagining of festival structure, geography, and temporality. The aim is to foster a sustainable network of participation that supports artistic practice within its respective situated contexts—a spatial gesture intended to subvert some of the inscribed hierarchies of mobility that often form the basis for global visibility. The Netting Groups shape the tone, rhythm, and direction of the festival in Berlin as a festival of gestures, while simultaneously extending beyond the event itself into long-term collaborations.

Information about the participants of the respective netting groups can be found on the Festival website.