transmediale 2026, By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road , took place from 28 January to 1 February at silent green Kulturquartier and CANK Neukölln in Berlin. Across four days, the programme unfolded in High Tide and Low Tide moments, featuring an extensive discursive and performance programme alongside a series of temporary relational architectures and installations across both venues. Bringing together artists, researchers, and practitioners from the tropical belt and beyond, the festival also continued its longstanding relationship with Chile.

Chilean participation this year included a DJ set by Berlin-based Chilean artist Diamin , as well as a listening session by sound artist Nicole L’Huillier , former transmediale resident and long-term collaborator of the festival. The festival’s graphic design was, for the third consecutive year, directed and developed by Bárbara Acevedo Strange .

By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road are the metaphorical coordinates that festival curators Neema Githere and Juan Pablo García Sossa introduced to examine the re·figuration of systems, cosmologies, and technologies. The festival's visual identity extends the curatorial proposition of creating an elastic structure. Conceived as an open and adaptive system, it unfolds through a series of fluid glyphs that evolve in relation to the festival's expanding terminology.

The festival logo responds to the edition’s pluriversal orientation, operating as an unstable sign continually shifting form and meaning across contexts. In alignment with the curators' method of endemizing, the visual language draws from vernacular design practices, such as graphics found in public transport. This approach produces a bold and dynamic visual vocabulary while grounding the identity within lived, everyday aesthetic systems.