“A living, recursive support network – a hammock of relational technologies in practice that spans latitudes, rhythms and root systems” was intended to be this year’s edition of the Berlin media art festival Transmediale – whatever that means. “It thus opens up both a geographical and a theoretical shift in the discourse about technology and media on which our current understanding of the Internet as a global network is based.”
What happened last weekend in the Silent Green Kulturquartier in Wedding and in the event location CANK in Neukölln was actually visible, however, showed that the implementation of well-sounding, postcolonial curatorial prose was only partially convincing about the festival as “a collaboratively designed space in which the protocols developed along the equator-spanning intertropical convergence zone can be experienced and shared”.
“In line with the process-oriented approach of the 2026 festival, the program will continue to develop in the days leading up to the festival,” it said two weeks before the event Transmediale in a press release – which translated meant that there was apparently no final planning yet. Even at the festival itself there were occasional jerks – is it really not possible to connect a laptop to a projector at Germany’s largest media art festival, like at the panel with DJ Jay Mitta from Tanzania?
The program that curators Neema Githere and Juan Pablo García Sossa put together under the title “By the Mango Belt and Tamarind Road” was intended to correct the traditionally Eurocentric orientation of the festival and brought an unprecedented number of artists from the Global South to cold, icy Berlin. This gave the festival a long overdue expansion of horizons. Unfortunately, the implementation fell short of the ambitious announcements.
Inhospitable place
First of all, there was a disinterested-looking compilation of installations that had been thrown into the former C&A on Karl-Marx-Straße in Neukölln. The few visitors who even got lost in this strange place found an inhospitable, comment-free compilation of works that one had to make up one’s own mind about.
The artists shown here can rightly consider themselves burned out
Why there were rubber dolls lying on the floor on the first floor or where the scenes that could be illuminated as holograms with a flashlight on metal plates were taking place, or what the purpose of the Tiktoks shown on vertically hung monitors was, was not clear from the plan with the titles of the works. You couldn’t decipher it in the darkness of the exhibition anyway. The artists shown here can rightly consider themselves burned out.
The festival in the underground halls of Silent Green also largely lacked any meaningful contextualization. Here, too, there are no labels for the works shown, no guided tours or visitor programs and, by the way, no press event before the start of the festival.
What could possibly under other circumstances have enabled spontaneous surprise experiences became, in the masses, an arbitrary and at some point overwhelming series of exotic displays. A lecture-performance about karaoke in the Philippines and a concert with Karinding, a bamboo harmonica from West Kalimantan. Films about water consumption in the production of computer chips in Taiwan and an “Afrofuturistic sci-fi punk musical.”
And lots of activities to be there and take part in: screen printing, making sourdough, getting your nails done, “ritualistic walks” every morning. As well as an event called “Bedrot With Me”, where you could hang out on your cell phone together with the artist İdil Galip – “a collective experiment in which you do almost nothing. This session is an invitation to lie together and scroll, to dream and drift off, to rest in stasis.” Ok, that was kind of funny – if it hadn’t been announced as a highlight of the discourse program.
Festivals are always surprise bags. But in the way this year’s Transmediale refused to mediate, it was a shining example of the new cultural style that the American author Anna Kornbluh described in her recent book “Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism” (2024). This form of culture is characterized by a “negation of mediation”; in the age of social media and FOMO, immediacy replaces the mediating, distancing function of art; (Alleged) authenticity triumphs over reflection and discourse – as with the ritual drinking of coca tea together, which is actually a program item at this year’s Transmediale.
What at former transmedia artists Something that often got out of hand, namely talking about art instead of presenting it, was largely missing this time. Accordingly, the Malian literary scholar Manthia Diawara recommended a “poetics of the mangrove” in a lecture that was probably intended to be programmatic, based on the French Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant. What does it look like? “Agreeing with the trembling of others and shaking with them.”
Where debate is replaced by “elective affinity”, it fits into the picture that one of the few items on the program where there was any serious discussion took place in a drafty corner with no seating. Anyone sitting on the floor who wanted to know who was talking about what had to ask the sound engineer. He then typed the web address of the “event within the event” into the browser on your smartphone.
By the way, the arbitrariness of this year’s festival is apparently intentional: an ominous “Advisory Board” ordered Transmediale last year that the event’s curators be replaced every year. So the transmedia is left to transients who want to add an entry to their CV and don’t develop any connection to the location of the festival. This year’s curators Githere and Sossa can definitely look for new jobs starting today – just like everyone who will lead Transmediale in the future. Perhaps that goes some way towards explaining the sausage nature of this year’s event.