By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road opens with an evening of music, performance, film screenings, interactive installations, and sonic explorations.

Timeline

18.00 Doors open

19:00 Welcome and Opening remarks (Betonhalle)

20:00 wordsofAzia (Kuppelhalle)

21:00 Interspecifics (Betonhalle)

22:00 Miss Tacacá (Betonhalle)

The doors of silent green open at 18:00, followed by welcoming remarks from transmediale and the festival’s curators, Neema Githere and Juan Pablo García Sossa.

La Clave / The Key / The Pass

This mixtape unfolds as a call-and-response across the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ): a ping-pong exchange between Caribbean salsa and Congolese rumba, where rhythms meet, collide, and humidly converge. Guided by la clave as a navigational protocol - compass, key, and shared password - the mix attunes bodies and systems to algo·rhythms shaped by circulation, memory, and multi-situated exchange. Moving between vinyl inheritance and digital commoning, rumba becomes orientation and salsa a method of relation. As the welcoming notes to By The Mango Belt & Tamarind Road, this mixtape opens the festival through rhythm as technology: a way of compassing, syncing, and entering together.

Mixed by Juan Fortun and Karl Mayala Bizet .

wordsofAzia , a French-born artist of Ivorian heritage, blends soulful melodies, jazz, and traditional Bhété rhythms from the Ivory Coast into a deeply spiritual sound that moves across generations and geographies. Singing in Bhété and English, her music bridges ancestral memory and contemporary expression. Joined by her mother, Yao Rose, their performance offers a rich soundscape rooted in matriarchal memory and sonic alchemy.

Interspecifics presents a spatial sound and light performance designed to adapt to different architectural environments. Using a square dome as a physical field of spatialization, Sonic Grid redirects and refracts sound along its orthogonal axes, transforming architecture into an instrument.

Heavy strobing lights during this performace

With unique sounds and cadences, driven by the use of technologies that accelerate musical tempo, Miss Tacacá presents a set merging rhythmic variations from Caribbean genres such as calypso, merengue, and salsa with the electronic beats of Tecnomelody and BregaFunk.

In different spaces of silent green films by Petna Ndaliko Katondolo , Tianzhuo Chen , Montika Kham-on , and Juan Covelli will be screened, intertwined with a durational field recording by KMRU from the highlands of Simbu, Papua New Guinea (PNG).