We are excited to share a selection of projects and artists confirmed for By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road, the 2026 edition of transmediale, unfolding this January in Berlin.

The ethos of the 2026 edition proposes a recalibrated tempo of gathering: recursive, porous, and durational, combining expansive programming with spaces for re-regulation and conviviality. Framed metaphorically through the architecture of a shell, both the festival’s rhythm and its thematic focus center on rethinking infrastructures, digital ways of life, and the language forms that shape how we inhabit, interact with, and move through these systems. The festival venues will introduce a series of temporary architectures and installations that are conceived as conversational platforms; a space to spark exchange.

The Kuppelhalle of silent green , our main festival venue, will be transformed by Kidus Hailesilassie ’s large-scale installation 6,500 Alphabets Make a Map, a living atlas that draws on 20 indigenous African knowledge systems. Inviting visitors into an immersive and spatialised language archive, this artwork redefines “algorithm” as “algo + rhythm”; each data point a drumbeat in a communal, ancestral cadence.

Rooted in Isola Tong ’s weaving practice, the artist will present LAWALAWA, an installation and activated meshwork space that also offers a protocol. In Tong’s practice, the basket becomes a symbol of Bayotic Refugia, a term she coined that merges “bayot,” the Bisayan language term for queer or femme, with “biota,” referring to the plant and animal life of a particular region. The basket serves as a metaphor for refuge, where broken life can heal and regenerate within oppressive environments. The net structure functions as a physical, offline "web", both an installation and a space to be held in.

Each morning, artist Rochelle Webster Nembhard, one of the festival’s spatial architects, will lead Pray-per-view, a 15-minute ritual walk setting the collective tempo for the festival day. Nembhard’s work weaves diasporic, ancestral, and futuristic aesthetics through ritual, art, and embodied practice.

Artist Simon Speiser will present a new installation, Cuerdas del Manglar - Strings from the Mangrove. Drawing on the history of the maroon society of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, Speiser connects speculative physics with histories of colonial re-existence expressed through music and syncretic ritual. Using string theory as a framework, he overlays the idea of black holes onto the shipwrecks that enabled Afro-Ecuadorian communities to form early maroon settlements. Composed of scratch holograms engraved into metal sheets, the installation reflects images from Esmeraldenian cultural memory while also echoing the region’s ancestral gold mining practices.

Stay tuned for more programme updates.