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

Under the title By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road – Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring, the 39th edition of transmediale festival will take place from 29 January to 1 February 2026 in Berlin. The festival’s main venue will be silent green Kulturquartier, with additional satellite venues across the city to be announced.

Curated by Neema Githere and Juan Pablo García Sossa , transmediale 2026 engages with different ways of understanding systems, cosmologies, and technologies. The festival reimagines itself as a living, recursive carrier net – a hammock of relational technologies in practice, stretching across latitudes, rhythms, and root systems. It offers both a geographical and theoretical shift in the prevalent discourse on technology, media, and our understanding of the internet as a world wide web. Expanding beyond a conference framework and the showcasing of completed works, the festival days in Berlin will invite audiences into a communal space where the protocols cultivated across the intertropical convergence zones become tangible, shareable, and recursive.

The imaginative coordinates By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road are situated within the tropical belt. Alluding to China’s One Belt One Road Initiative that often presents itself as an alternative to developing and infrastructuring but keeps perpetuating similar dependency models and verticalities, the festival examines the underlying structures that shape both the material and imagined aspects of our systems. What are ways of netting otherwise? How can we re·wire the root codes of our systems and condition ourselves differently? What forms of infra·structuring can emerge when we step outside extractive paradigms?

The methodology of transmediale 2026 is guided by the principles of Compassing, Metaphoring, and Protocoling. Through its undercurrents is a process-oriented exchange that extends across distinct periods of time: an understanding of technology as a connective element and an intergenerational network, as a continuous transformation that encompasses and links pasts, presents, and futures. Accordingly, the festival is conceived as an elastic, multilayered ecosystem in which participants can collectively envision, navigate, and experiment with infrastructures. The relational axes of the festival are the Research Netting Groups, which inform the curatorial process and will shape the gathering in Berlin in the form of installations, sonic experiments, and temporary architectures. These groups operate through distributed IRL and URL gatherings, designed in collaboration with local hosts, bringing together artists, technologists, collectives, and cultural spaces across the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road. The Research Netting Groups situate themselves in Pasifika, the Swahili Coast, Southeast Asia, and Abya Yala, as well as online, creating distributed nodes for collaboration and exchange that will extend beyond the 2026 festival.

The new visual identity for transmediale 2026 is now live. The full curatorial statement can be found on the theme page of the festival website.

Further programme announcements, including festival venues and collaborations, will follow in November.