By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road:
Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring
28 January – 1 February 2026
silent green Kulturquartier and venues across Berlin

“In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”
Ben Okri

“Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.”
Ursula K. Le Guin

The 39th edition of transmediale looks at the re·figuration of systems, cosmologies, and technologies through the metaphorical coordinates By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road. Understanding Compassing, Metaphoring, and Protocoling as ways to bridge a multiplicity of recipes to the root-code of our systems, the festival asks if your imagination is hungry; what are the currents on our feeds; what’s at the root of our codes.

transmediale 2026 reimagines the festival as a living recursive carrier net – a hammock of relational technologies in practice that stretch across latitudes, rhythms, and root systems – converging in Berlin from 28 January to 1 February 2026 at silent green Kulturquartier and a series of interlinked interventions and time·spaces throughout the city and beyond.

Conceived by curators Neema Githere and Juan Pablo García Sossa, the upcoming festival offers a pluriversal infrastructuring of timelines, knowledges, and situated techne – guided by relation, reciprocity, and re·figuration. It brings together reparative practitioners, artists, researchers, makers, thinkers, doers, and doulas at::from::towards the crossroads By The Mango Belt & Tamarind Road – an imaginative space where not only ingredients and datasets are diversified, but rather recipes and models are shaken. Reaching beyond a site for discussion, transmediale 2026 offers a space of embodied re·positioning, where technologies, systems, and rituals are re·coded in real time – slowly, collectively, tenderly.

transmediale 2026 is envisioned as a multi-temporal and multi-spatial ecosystem. A weaving of URL and IRL activations unfolds over the year 2025 through the braiding of Research Netting Groups. These assemble distributed gatherings and digital rituals that stretch across the intertropical convergence zones, anchoring the festival in a distributed configuration and shaping the diverse containers, holding·structures, and hanging·structures that will be giving shape to the dates in Berlin.

Further programme and participant announcements coming soon.