Forecast Festival _ BerLINights: Mapping safety after dark

Forecast Festival

Forecast offers artists and creative thinkers from anywhere in the world the chance to work with accomplished mentors toward bringing their projects to fruition. As an international mentorship program with annual editions, Forecast transcends neatly defined disciplines and genres to provide insight into creative production processes and carve out space for the questions on the minds of the next generation of trailblazers. Each year, creative minds working in various disciplines are invited to submit project proposals via an open call. The selection process is two-tiered. First, the mentors carefully review all proposals and invite three nominees each to workshop with the mentor and present their ideas at the Forecast Forum in Berlin. At the Forum’s conclusion, each mentor chooses one mentee. The six mentees receive extended mentoring including a work-stay, in which mentor and mentee meet in person for up to two weeks of intensive exchange, usually with a host institution. At the end of the mentorship phase, the six mentees present their final productions to the public at the Forecast Festival.

Collaboration with LINA Fellows

We invited the LINA Fellows Adam Przywara, Dérive, Elena Agudio Sierra, RadioLina, and

wit(h)nessing to host a rich program of activations proposing viable prototypes for a future human and nonhuman habitat as part of the Forecast Festival. The LINA Fellows' program included BerLINights: Mapping safety after dark, an exploratory nighttime walk with architect Elena Agudo Sierra; Mountains of Berlin: Documenting Landfills of Postwar Rubble, a walk by Adam Przywara and Jonathan Banz exploring artificial hills around Berlin made of war rubble; The Joy of Constructing Situations, a Situationist workshop by Dérive; (UN)COMMON THREADS, a workshop and speculative storytelling game by Wit(h)nessing; and RADIO LINA, a sound installation by Atelier Remoto + AlteSfere.

The chosen LINA Fellows all have a unique approach spatial experimentation through collaboration (which they share with the mission of LINA itself), and we invited them to further implement this at our Forecast Festival.

Elena Agudo-Sierra: BerLINights: Mapping safety after dark

Elena Agudio Sierra, art historian and curator, invited participants of her workshop to analyze Berlin in terms of safety and vulnerability after dark through an explorative nighttime walk, the application of collective mapping techniques, and the analysis of both objective and subjective data. The participants used tools such as physical tagging, puzzle scanning, and/or WebGIS. Through personal reflections and group discussions, the participants created a collective manifesto to visualize a safer urban night world.